The Unorthodox Website Blog

A GAY TAPESTRY

By

Tony Millard

(This manuscript is the copyright of the Webmaster of The Unorthodox Website Blog and may not be reproduced without permission of the author.)

 (Dedicated to the memory of my partner George Millard, whose recollections and those of his friends are used in this biography.)

‘When people complain there is no purpose, reason or justice in life, I remind them of a Chinese parable about a tapestry. From the back, it seems a jungle of unconnected meaningless threads but when you turn the tapestry over, there is a perfect pattern and design. Life is a tapestry.’ -  George Millard

INTRODUCTION

When my partner unexpectedly got ill and died after 21 years together I was in a state of deep shock, and I resolved to write down his life story. George had done so much in his 48 years, met so many interesting characters, been to so many places and found himself in such unusual situations. He should have written his autobiography, and I have used as much of his written notes as I can in compiling this book, along with recollections of himself and his friends.

I wanted to also write of our great love and how it changed us both from the people we were, so this had to be a biography of two people. It turned out to be much more than that as you will discover.

This is the story of a boy from a poor part of Glasgow who at a very early age became enmeshed in a world of gay prostitution and drugs, whose parents died when he was young, and who, although deprived of a university education through circumstances, possessed a questioning, analytical intellect which drove him to an appreciation of literature and the arts, and to become a wit, cynic and a philosopher by his 20s. He moved to London, where he slept rough and mixed with other prostitutes of both sexes. He even lived for a while as a rent boy in Paris, his favorite city. He got involved with a secretive revolutionary political group which used drugs and hypnosis to gain a hold over its followers, and he became paranoid about anything even vaguely leftwing. He believed in God and reincarnation.
 

This is also the story of another boy, of Anglo-Greek-Cypriot parentage, who grew up in London and led a very sheltered, puritanical life, not discovering sex or the gay scene until well into his 20s. No sex, no drugs, but he did indulge in Rock’n’Roll of the 1950s variety, becoming a second-generation Teddy-boy. His adolescent sexual frustration was dealt with by throwing himself wholeheartedly into the peace movement of the early 1960s, and then becoming part of the revolutionary leftist backlash to the Wilson government/Vietnam War in the late 1960s. He became a hardline member of the Communist Party, and an atheist.

We two met in our mid 20s, and somehow, despite our totally different backgrounds and political beliefs, we fell in love and stayed together 21 years till death parted us. During those years we traveled the world together, met all sorts of people, taught each other important lessons and made each other laugh with our imaginary characterizations and sketches performed at parties and on video. George taught me an appreciation of the theater, good films and literature, and our religious and political beliefs became almost identical. Only our tastes in music never really converged.

George’s sudden death from an AIDS-related illness was most unusual because of the time-lapse of only two weeks from first becoming really ill to his death. He never had an HIV test, so his HIV status remained unknown, depriving him of the support and financial benefits he was entitled to. He died just four days after first being diagnosed, and we both believed the hospital had got it wrong. I was left to struggle with the diagnosis alone, for family and friends were not told. Knowing little about AIDS, and with no-one but George’s community nurse to turn to for advice and support, it took me months before I could accept it.

Remarkably, the story did not end with George’s death, for our love lives on beyond the grave, as witnessed by the many ways George continues to contact me and our friends, even giving me a present.

So this book contains biography, philosophy, a travelog, arts appreciation, gay erotica, humor, tragedy, politics and evidence of survival after death. It is above all a gay love story which proves the cliché that ‘love conquers all’.

- Tony Millard.

1. THE YEAR WE MET

We met on Thursday September 10th, 1970. I was due on night shift at Overseas Telegrams, but instead stayed on at England’s oldest cinema, The Biograph in Victoria.  Little known by the general public, this establishment was a gay meeting place for many decades, and most gay men did not go there to see the films.

On this particular occasion, George had actually gone especially to see a film called ‘The Group’. I sat next to him, and that is how we met. After the film ended I asked if he would like to go for a drink, he told me he did not drink, but I persisted and invited him for a tea or coffee. We went over to the buffet on Victoria station, and after a chat we agreed to meet again the following Sunday.

I think it was on that first day we met, while he waited with me at the 24/29 bus-stop outside Victoria station in Wilton Road for my bus to Camden Town, that I told him I had just come back from a holiday in the Soviet Union. I remember telling him proudly how everybody had TV sets (a symbol of affluence as I saw it), and George was unimpressed and remarked that TV was an easy way to spread propaganda to brainwash people. Our political differences had already become apparent.

We nevertheless kept meeting up, and despite his doubts at first I convinced George that I was genuine, and not part of  a mysterious leftwing political group, who he told me later had on occasions hypnotized him whilst he slept. He was obviously very worried by this group, and was in poor health due to the stress. There was a history of heart trouble in his family, and at the time I met him George was attending the National Heart Hospital regularly because he suffered from palpitations.

 When I met him he certainly was frightened to the point of paranoia by this sinister group of people, only one of whom George ever positively identified to me. I never found out exactly what the group was, but according to a letter George wrote his sister years before I met him, which she showed me after his death, George feared this group was part of some KGB plot to destabilize the government and ferment revolution.
 

When George told me about how these people were threatening him (I cannot remember if they had actually used violence against him or not), I just wanted to protect him and make him feel secure. I told him later this was the moment when I knew I loved him, and he replied that this emotion was pity, not love. He was wrong – it was much more than pity, though obviously my heart went out to him when he told me how scared he was of these people. My reaction, however, was not just one of pity, but of knowing I loved him and wanted to be with him as much as I could, so no one could hurt him again. The seeds of our love grew from there.

That these seeds ever took root and flourished seems to be a miracle, because at the time we met, when George was paranoid about anything vaguely leftwing and Communism in particular, I was a paid-up member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and attached to an unofficial Stalinist faction fighting ‘revisionism’ in the Party.

When George came to see me for the first time at my mother’s council flat in Camden Town, he was horrified when he saw my room. Not only had I painted it in violent orange and black colors, which were evidence of my disturbed mind at the time, but the room was a pseudo-religious shrine to Stalinism. Soviet propaganda posters lined the walls, and on the back of the door were black and white tapestries of Lenin and Stalin, with Soviet medallions and badges attached. The centerpiece I’d created an atheistic altar to Communism draped in a red hammer and sickle flag on which stood a statue of Lenin and a volume of his collected works.
 

After seeing this room George must have wanted to cut off all contact with me, suspecting I was another member of this group trying to get close to him. Yet, in a way, the fact that I was so open about my political beliefs may have convinced him I was not a member of this clandestine group, who would surely have hidden their motives in order to gain his trust. They would more likely have used someone who claimed to be non-political or a Conservative, rather than a raging Stalinist fanatic.

Nevertheless we wrote each other love letters, were meeting at least three times a week, and  started going out to the cinema together. Throughout our 21 years as a couple we regularly went to see films and plays, and my tastes changed over the years as he got me to appreciate good cinema and theater.

In a letter to me George said how much he needed me emotionally, and that this was so much more important than the sexual aspect of our relationship. This proved to be so true over the years, for as the physical side of our relationship subsided (we were never really sexually compatible), our emotional bonds grew stronger than ever. We cuddled a lot and shared a bed till the very end, and never stopped loving each other, but sex did not enter into the relationship in the end, and was never important even at the beginning.

After he died, I found out from one of our friends that George was unemployed when he met me, but quickly found work . He told the friend, a gay guy known as Lena, that he had done this because he had met a wonderful person. He got a job with the British Film Institute in Dean Street, Soho, for I met him there several times after he finished work. 
 

One day I asked my mother if she would mind George staying the night, i.e. sharing my single bed, and that gave her something to think about, but she finally agreed. She did not really have much option, because I had already left home two years previously and had only agreed to share a flat with her again if she accepted my lifestyle. Had she refused my request, she knew I would simply move out again.

George received quite a culture shock when I took him to a 1950s-style rock’n’roll revival club frequented by Teddy-boys and leather-jacketed rockers. That night the club was particularly packed as American rocker Gene Vincent was appearing there. George never liked crowded places at the best of times, and I pushed as near to the stage as I could with George in front of me, whilst everyone around was pushing, shoving and going mad. George told me afterwards he would never come with me again, and accused me of screaming in his ear like a silly schoolgirl all the way through Gene’s performance.

On his visits to our flat in Bradfield Court George brought various gifts, such as a plant, and making his own ice cream became a specialty of his. We watched TV, played records, looked at photos, and read poetry together, among other things. George used to write poems, all of them very sad. He never wrote one about me, because he said he could only write poetry when he was unhappy, about depressing things like death, hardship, lost love, and so on. He felt too happy about our relationship to be able to compose his kind of melancholy, but beautiful, poetry.
 

He tried to instil some sense of culture and the arts in me, and one day, after seeing the Christmas illuminations in Regent Street, he took me (and my aunt) to see ‘La Boheme’ at The Coliseum. Sadly, although I enjoyed some of the arias, I could never really understand classical music or opera, and George stopped going himself eventually, partly because of the high cost of tickets. It is ironic that we only met another gay couple who were also great classical music lovers a few months before George died, or he might have had many years of concert-going with friends who shared his appreciation of fine music. However, he did teach me to love the theater and good films, and introduced me to some of the great writers.

On Christmas Day 1970 I spent what proved to be our very last traditional family Christmas with my grandparents, mother, brother, aunts and uncles in Welwyn Garden City. George always hated Christmas (not least because his mother died at this time of year when he was very young), but he told me he was spending it with friends. In actual fact he was in his bed-sitter trying his utmost to ‘ignore’ the ‘festive season’.

He never met my grandmother, but he did speak to her briefly on the phone when he rang me there on Christmas Day. I remember my grandmother saying she was glad I had met a friend. She no doubt realized how lonely I had been in my teenage years, but I don’t know if she knew I was gay. A few days later my grandmother, who was 83 and in relatively good health, slipped and broke her hip whilst trying to reach a saucepan on a high shelf in the kitchen, and she never fully recovered. The hip mended in hospital, but the accident accelerated the aging process and she seemed to lose the will to live. Dementia set in, and my mother had to give up her job and stay in Welwyn Garden City to look after her.

On New Year’s Eve 1970/71 George came over and we saw our first New Year in together. It was to be the first of many, and being Scots, Hogmanay meant much more to George than Christmas.

We had made it to the end of the year, yet there was a time when we almost did not. Soon after we met, George was due to call round at my place one Sunday, but failed to turn up or phone. I panicked, feeling I would never see him again, and just had to get over to Pimlico and find out what was wrong. I feared he was fed up with me, or something dreadful had happened.

When I arrived I managed to get in the main front door and up to his room, where I knocked and knocked on the door but he refused to answer. Then his flatmate turned up and let me in and there was George in bed either asleep or pretending to be. He told me he was not feeling well, and I immediately rushed out to a nearby chemist to get him some medication. I believe he described the symptoms of flu, but I am sure he had been scared off by my Communist fanaticism, probably thinking I was indeed part of the sinister group he was so anxious to escape from. He told me later that the way I rushed over and became so genuinely concerned when he said he was ill proved to him that my love was real.

I cannot help thinking what might have happened to both of us had I not gone over to Pimlico that Sunday, and had his flatmate not turned up when he did. Certainly both our lives would have been very different, probably much sadder, and I doubt either of us would have traveled the world separately as much as we did together. Would I today still be ignorant of the theater, and know only the trivial cinema of action and horror stories? Would George have survived the stress of fighting sinister forces alone, and the heart palpitations this was causing him to suffer?

There is one thing George never forgave me for: the first time he came round to my flat I never offered him a cup of tea, only a cola. I had to live with his rebuke throughout our 21 years together: ‘You never even offered me a cup of tea when I first came to see you.’

Yet, from such an unpromising start, a relationship grew which proved strong enough to overcome all the trials of the years. It was not to be a bed of roses by any means. On the eve of 1971, over 20 years of good and bad times, rough and smooth, give and take, lay ahead of us.

2. BACK TO OUR ROOTS – EARLY CHILDHOOD

George was born in Glasgow in 1943. His birth had been induced by an air-raid, for when a bomb fell at the stroke of midnight at the end of the street, his mother started going into labor. George was born two and a quarter hours later. It is reported that his screams, as he was pulled protesting into the world, frightened his mother more than the air-raid sirens.

Just under two years later hundreds of miles away in the Middlesex Hospital, just off London’s Oxford Street, I was born with a club foot, hare lip and cleft palate, disfigurements which could well have been caused by the shock of a V2 exploding, which caused my mother to almost lose the baby when she was just three months pregnant. I was born in March 1945, and whilst my mother and I were still in the hospital, another bomb blew all the windows in. A few weeks later the war in Europe ended.

One of George’s earliest memories was of a sense of panic in a passage-way as his mother appeared to be attempting to suffocate him. Fearing they we’re going to be buried in rubble when a bomb fell nearby, she protected baby George with her own body from the falling debris. His sister retained an equally vivid memory of this incident, and according to George was jealous of the protection the ‘spoiled screaming brat’ was getting.  This grew into open antagonism as they became rivals and arch-enemies as children. 
 

George’s mother must have been as straight-speaking as George was, for he remembers them visiting a cinema near Glasgow’s Charing Cross where his Aunt Lily, whom his mother detested, worked as a part-time usherette.

‘Did you like the film, Elizabeth?’ asked Lily in her pseudo-posh accent at the end of the performance.

‘A damn sight better than I like you,’ was his mother’s retort, hurriedly dragging him ‘away from the awful aunt as if she had the plague’, as George later wrote about the incident.

George and his family lived in a very closely-knit community in Glasgow’s Partick area. It was a working-class district of tenement blocks, and all his aunts, uncles and cousins seemed to have lived in the same street.

By contrast my own family was spread all over London and the Southeast. My first two homes were in the relative affluence of West Hampstead – a reflection of my father’s successful restaurant business. My father was always a very distant figure. He was in the restaurant till midnight, then went to Greek-Cypriot clubs gambling, wining (rather than winning), dining and womanizing. He would come home in the early hours and sleep till midday or longer. I rarely saw much of him. As my mother was English and did not speak Greek, it is little wonder I grew up speaking only English, whereas my Greek-Cypriot cousins brought up in London also speak Greek. I did pick up a few words and phrases, but soon forgot these once my parents separated when I was six.
 

My father often got drunk and would come home and beat my mother. Once when she asked for some housekeeping money he told her to ‘go down Piccadilly and earn some’.  Of course she wouldn’t have dreamt of doing this, but had she taken him at his word it would have resulted in another beating.

She never got back money she lent him to buy his first restaurant, a pie and mash shop. When he sold it at a profit and she asked for her share, he said she had eaten it in the pie and mash she had eaten whilst working there.
 

My mother left my father in 1951 after a friend told her that a planned holiday in Cyprus was not all it seemed. Apparently my father had bought only one-way tickets for my brother and myself, and was determined we should be brought up in Cyprus. My mother was particularly worried about me because I needed constant hospital treatment and operations for my leg, lip and palate, for which I was under specialists at the Middlesex Hospital, and then of course there was the continuing drunken violence towards my mother.

So we went first to a refuge in Fulham, then spent a few weeks with my mother’s eldest brother and large family in rural Kent, before moving in with my grandparents in Wood Green. This became the place I now think of as my childhood home. We had an overgrown garden with an outside toilet, a lawn, flowers, a hen coop and gooseberry bushes.

When we moved in the street was still illuminated by gas lamps, the milkman still delivered by horse and cart, as did the coalman, emptying sacks into our cellar coal-hole. There were left-overs from the War such as ration books for things like sweets and sugar, and at the corner of the street were pig-bins into which everybody put their potato peelings and other vegetable waste. We knew all our neighbors and I can still recall their names, so different from today. 
 

Gradually, in the mid 1950s, the character of the street began to change as families moved out and new occupants moved in to what were now becoming flats and bed-sit accommodation. A Polish woman studying to be a doctor moved into an upstairs bed-sit next door, finding it difficult to concentrate on her studies with my brother and me screaming and shouting in our garden. She’d poke her head out of the window and tell us to be quiet in her strange Polish accent, a performance we found so amusing  we deliberately used to scream our heads off. One day my grandfather discovered Mrs ‘Do-not-shout’ as we called her muttering to herself at the end of her garden behind our hen house, not saying her prayers as he thought but the only quiet place she could find to study her medical books.

Downstairs a black family from Barbados moved in. Although apprehensive at first, my grandmother became the best of friends with them and used to baby sit, coming back to tell us about exotic Barbadian recipes.
 

The ample Mrs White, who lived there previously, was always leaning over the brick wall in Norman Evans style, and once complained that her husband was late for work because our kitchen clock was slow.

A neighbor once offered us to stay in a lovely bungalow they went to every year. Its garden had a large hut which would sleep several people, a brook at the end, and the sea was nearby. We went with my uncle and his family and it turned into the holiday from Hell.

My mother had a broken in plaster, so my aunt had to do most of the housework, and the accommodation turned out to be two ramshackle huts with no running water, electricity, piped gas or sanitation. Cold water had to be obtained from a solitary tap in the middle of a field, shared with dozens of other families. We had Calor gas and oil-lamps, and a smelly Elsan toilet which Len had to empt into the ‘brook’ (actually a sewage ditch) at the bottom of the garden.  The River Blackwater was aptly named with thick black mud when the tide was out, and the ‘boulders on the beach’ turned out to be the bombed remains of an old sea wall.

Usually we went a boarding house on the sea front in Margate.. This also had no running water in the rooms, but Jean was a cheerful woman who called everyone ‘lovey’ and who used to bring up huge old fashioned jugs and bowls of hot water to wash in every morning, and cups of tea.

However, there was a rather coarse sister, Elsie, who was working at the Margate house one year when we arrived with my grandparents. My grandmother did not think her at all suitable to be serving at tables with children and adolescents like myself and my brother, for she was making crude comments about ‘a bit of the other’ all the time. One year, at the Cliftonville house, my mother remarked on the nice potted plants. Jean’s daughter remarked: ‘Yeah, me’n’Elsie nicked ‘em from Butlins’ (who had some hotels down the road).

This ‘daughter’, if indeed that is what she was, arrived suddenly one year as a tiny baby at the Margate house.

‘One of the visitors left her, lovey,’ said Jean in explanation, leaving the rest to the imagination.

We all loved the place, but George and his family only got day trips to Rothesay, sailing down the River Clyde on the Waverley paddle-steamer, but his family did have TV since the early 1950s. We never got ours till nearly ten years later.

With my cleft-palate and club-foot, I underwent a lot of operations during my childhood. They straightened my foot and closed the hare lip soon after birth, but it left me with one leg shorter than the other, a fixed right ankle, a scar on my upper lip, a cleft palate and associated dental problems. In 1951 I slipped on the wet tiles of the front pathway and broke my bad leg. I had to stay in hospital for six months with my leg in traction, lest I should lose any more length from the injured right limb, already several inches shorter than the left one.
 

I missed a lot of schooling, and so my mother and grandparents decided to send me to a private school for a year to catch up. ‘Beaumaris School for Girls’ was a local institution which took boys up the age of seven, and was situated in a big old Victorian house and run by two elderly spinsters. ‘Playtime’ consisted of sedately walking around the garden in line doing lady-like exercises. Numerous cats freely wandered around the school, jumping up on desks whilst we were having lessons. The day always started with a reading session from Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ books, which introduced me to them and made me a firm fan, collecting all the books in the series. Punishments included going down to the cellar with a coal scuttle to collect fuel for the fires, and crawling up the stairs on your hands and knees. 
 

This school certainly helped me catch up on my missed education, but whether attending a predominantly girls’ school had anything to do with my later homosexuality or not, it certainly did not get me used to mixing with men. My father had always been absent and so I had been surrounded by women since birth, brought up by my mother, doted on by waitresses and women cashiers in my father’s restaurant, and surrounded by female nurses in hospital. My grandmother was a very dominant woman, and my grandfather very quiet.

All the men in my life were distant and hostile. I had seen my father in a drunken rage smashing our furniture when we were leaving him. Male doctors and surgeons in hospital had always been associated with painful examinations and operations, and my grandfather was a frightening figure who scolded us for damaging his garden.

When I went to the local State school and was due to go into a male teacher’s class for the first time I cried all night because I was so terrified of men with whom, at the age of eight, I had never had any close contact.

On my first day at primary school, back in 1950, I was disgusted when looking for the toilet to see boys urinating against what looked to me like a wall. I’d never seen a urinal before, my father never being around to take me into a gents’ toilet. I kept wandering into the girls’ toilet at this school only to be chased out back to the boys pissing against the wall! I was also chased out of the Wendy House in the classroom, and told by the teacher it was for ‘girls only’ but I could be the postman. So even back then, aged 5, my eventual sexual orientation was probably predictable.

A lonely child, when I was about 9 Michael, a boy in my class, befriended me. A cheerful lad with a lovely personality and smile. He became my best friend for years both in and out of school. While other children mimicked the way I talked (a muffled nasal tone because of my cleft palate), or called me ‘Hop-Along-Cassidy’ or ‘Hopadopoulos’ because of my Greek name and bad leg, Michael was always kind and considerate and made me laugh. He too had a strange foreign name, beginning with a ‘Z’, because his paternal grandfather was Czech, so perhaps that helped draw us together. There were not that many foreigners in London’s outer suburbs then.

Around 1950, when George was about seven, his mother died. It was Christmas time when she was taken ill, but George was not told. All he knew was that she was missing. He was given toys, but knew something was wrong. His father made George say a prayer for his mother, after which he cried and cuddled the boy. George was not used to this show of emotion from his father. ‘Did this sudden closeness contribute to my subsequent homosexuality?’ muses George when writing about these events.                    
 

It was not until later he was told that his mother had died of heart failure, apparently two days after Christmas. George was at first just told she had gone to stay with a relative.

His aunts wore black dresses and black stockings for months. Eventually ‘one of my uncles was given the task of breaking the terrible truth’, George wrote, ‘”Your Mammy has gone to Heaven” he explained. Next year, my father asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I inadvertently upset him, stating: “I want my Mammy back”. This may have prompted him several years later to bestow a step-mother on me.’

Over the period of George’s mother’s death he stayed with a relative and had to share a bed with a girl cousin. George much later confided to both myself and his sister that this cousin sexually assaulted him when his mother was either dying or had just died. This too could well have contributed to his not wanting sexual relations with women in later life. The cousin had forced his hand into her private parts, an incident which still filled him with horror to talk about forty years later.

3. LATER CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Following the trauma of George’s mother’s sudden death they moved to a new house where, as he later wrote: ‘I slept in a huge bed cuddled close to my father. Then I played truant simply because I preferred sleep to school.’ One morning George was rudely awoken from a dream about the lessons he was evading when his irate father pulled him from the bed and took him to school. He was later told that this lapse in his schooling ‘prompted my father to find a replacement surrogate mother, whose name was Lizzie Lang’.

George wrote: ‘I needed a maternal figure. I was a lonely child with no friends because we’d moved to another district and another school. My sisters wouldn’t let me accompany them with their boyfriends to the cinema. So suddenly being given a stepmother who promised presents and security, I clung to her like a chick in the secure wings of a mother hen.

‘But along with this new mother came a stepbrother, Robin, with whom I formed a strange relationship. He was 2/3 years older. A delinquent – I stole from him. He killed my pet hamster and helped me bury it in the garden. He committed crimes. He liked rock’n’roll, Cliff Richard, Little Richard. We shared the same bed. We formed a sado-masochistic relationship. He tormented and taunted me with tricks. I suppose I was a horrible boring little brat.’

George told me quite a bit about this love-hate relationship with his stepbrother. Robin squeezed the life out of George’s pet hamster while George looked on powerless to stop him. He also tormented him by playing loud Little Richard and other rock’n’roll records, and he dressed as a Teddy-boy.

Years later George met me, who also loved Little Richard and rock’n’roll, had a quiff and sometimes wore the Teddy-boy gear. I can’t help feeling that must have been part of his attraction towards me, though he never admitted it in so many words. George’s sado-masochistic relationship with his stepbrother affected his later sexual tastes, but I could never role-play the sadistic Robin – I loved and respected George too much as a person. So we developed a deep, emotional, non-sexual relationship over the years we were together.

George and Robin shared a bed, and George used to feel the bed shake at night when Robin was masturbating, but at first did not know what was going on. After he had been ‘initiated by a kind strange man into the mysteries and magic of masturbation’, George realized what Robin was doing under the bedclothes.

Apparently one night his stepbrother came home frustrated from a date with his girlfriend and sexually abused George. Remembering the earlier sexual abuse by a girl cousin, George used to say he had suffered child sexual abuse from both a man and a woman.

This was how George told the story to myself and his sister, but in his written versions the sexual relationship with Robin is actually initiated by George. It seems Robin changed out of his jeans into football gear and left, but returned to the bedroom to catch George masturbating with his face buried in the discarded jeans. ‘Angrily, he swore at me, calling me a dirty fucking little bastard, put me across his knee, and started spanking me.’  This resulted in George experiencing an orgasm. ‘From that experience, the seeds of sado-masochistic sex were sowed inside me’, George wrote.

On a later occasion George felt and heard his stepbrother masturbating and Robin let George grope and then give him oral sex. After two minutes it was all over, and the young George could not understand why Robin (feeling guilty and ashamed) angrily pushed him aside. When George persisted with his groping, Robin ‘roughly turned me face-down on the bed, kicking me with his knee-cap, as the sound of spanking would have woken up the rest of the family.’ George wrote that he bribed Robin ‘with a pound of my pocket money’ to keep doing it till George climaxed, ‘and not tell our respective parents about my sexual misbehaviour’.

On one occasion Robin attempted to penetrate George anally, but was not very successful. Although George was presumably willing to lose his virginity, it was physically impossible without experience and a lot of lubricant. (In fact I myself only ever made one attempt, and was also unsuccessful.)

This rather one-sided sex in which only Robin received gratification seems only to have occurred on two or three sporadic occasions, and George wrote that ‘Robin rejected me completely with contempt.’

Three months after the last incident mentioned above, Robin married a girl whom he had made pregnant, and it was the end of George’s sexual relations with him. George wrote: ‘The only time I ever saw my stepbrother again, was when I was 25 and went back home, where I met him in the street where he introduced me to his wife and 4 children.’

George heard from his sister that their stepbrother later ‘had formed a suspect and scandalous relationship with a notorious homosexual with whom he shared a cell’ in prison. ‘He was last seen as an alcoholic deserted by his wife, mother and sisters and living in a hostel for the homeless. He could well be one of those huddled figures I hurriedly pass by as I go under Hungerford Bridge on certain nights.’

So George was initiated into gay sex at a very early age, possibly as young as 12, and by the time he moved to London at the age of 16 he was quite experienced, having been on the gay scene in Glasgow for several years. In complete contrast down in the London area I knew I was gay from the age of 13, but was totally isolated and frustrated throughout my teens, and never experienced sex of any kind until well into my twenties.

By the time I was 12 I had about three good friends at my secondary modern school. One in particular, Paul, introduced me to rock’n’roll 45s. Paul also had access to books depicting nude females, and I took quite an interest in these pictures. In break times we made up fantasies involving Paul’s imaginary Uncle Flook (the man with the oversized knob), his favorite film star Diana Dors and other women. I even had a crush on a girl in my class, making my brother take a round-about route to school so I could pass her house. I would then follow her all the way, pulling her pony-tail and teasing her.

After one of my spells in hospital, I returned to school, and Michael, my best friend, broke the news that this girl had died of Asian Flu, which swept Britain in 1957. I don’t think anybody knew I had a crush on her (except my mother who I told later), but I was quite upset at the time.

In that period there were enormous changes in my life. We’d moved out of my grandparents’ house to a council flat, and I spent most of the first part of 1958  in hospital for operations on my leg and on my lip. Then doctors kept coming in and looking at my private parts. I was not told anything, but I remember on a visit to the out-patients some time earlier my grandmother had taken me in to the almoner and whispered to her: ‘He’s not developing properly’.

I was only told a day or two before the operation that it had to be done ‘or I couldn’t get married and have children’. I was bitterly opposed to it, having had enough of hospitals and operations, and despising this seemingly unnecessary one about which everyone was being so secretive and deceitful. They seemed to be forcing me to have some operation I did not understand and did not want, without even bothering to tell me, let alone get my consent.

As my mother sat by my hospital bed and tried to explain why I could not come home yet but had to have a third operation during this one hospital stay, I argued vehemently with her: ‘I don’t want to get married and have children. I wasn’t meant to – that girl I was fond of died.’

It was no use. A 13-year old in those days had no rights and the operation was done. It had a traumatic effect which ruined my teenage years, and affected the rest of my life.

I do not blame my mother or grandparents, they thought they were doing the right thing. But the hospital should have known better and should have told them I had to be taken into their confidence at a very early stage, or the operation could have a devastating psychological effect on me. I am still not even convinced it was necessary, as puberty sometimes comes late, and I was barely 13 when the operation was done, only 12 when it was planned. It could certainly have been left another year or so. I also should have had psychological counseling both before and after the operation, but this was 1958 when such things were unheard of.

Some months later I had to return to the hospital for another operation to remove the deep stitches, and on being discharged, my brother and I went on a holiday in Saffron Walden staying at a sort of hostel. Two other boys shared our bedroom and for the very first time I began to be conscious of homosexual fantasies (about these boys). I had often fantasized about Diana Dors and the nude women in the picture books, but never about boys or men before. It was as though subconsciously I was rebelling against the operation, and making good my statement that I would never marry and have children. I found I enjoyed homosexual fantasies much more than heterosexual ones, and from that point on I knew I was gay. I had to wait nine long, miserable, frustrated, lonely years before I could even begin to fulfil those fantasies.
 

I was partly to blame for initiating queries about my development, for a year or two earlier when I shared a bedroom with my brother, he had awoken in the night frightened and worried because he had experienced his first erection, and thought something was wrong. I am ashamed to say that I did not reassure him, though I did of course experience erections myself. However, feeling guilty about the nudie picture books at school and the sexy stories about women I swopped with Paul (whom I knew my mother disapproved of as a bad influence), I made out I did not know what was wrong with his cock, and my mother must have been acutely embarrassed when Philip called her in to ask why his cock was all stiff. She then explained that this happens as you get older, and turned to me and said: ‘Yours goes the same, doesn’t it, Tony?’, whereupon I guiltily denied it.

Without a father to explain such matters to us, we lived in a sexually repressive household in which the only message which got drummed through to us was: ‘Never talk to strange men, never accept lifts or sweets from strangers and never use public toilets.’ This message had the effect of brainwashing, so that I obeyed it automatically, blocking off most possibilities of my experiencing gay sex and condemning myself to a miserable, isolated, frustrated teenage. Gays have to take some risks or we would never meet anyone like ourselves and would be forced to remain celibate all our lives.

This denial by me that I experienced sexual arousal must have alerted my mother to the fact that puberty had not yet taken place, and started her secret inquiries which led to the two dreaded operations. The physical and mental scars left by them made me even more introverted than ever, and I withdrew into a shell. To make matters worse, I changed schools in September and left my few friends behind. Michael was at my new school (actually a Technical College), but in a different department, studying draftmanship. I was doing a general business course.

Again I found myself in a predominantly girls’ school, with only seven other boys in my class, and nine in the class above. No more boys were taken for this course in the classes below us. One of the boys left in the first week to go back to his old school, and I should have done the same, for I could not get on with any of my remaining male school-mates, even though I had a crush on one of them.

The trauma of the operation left me in a terrible state where I found it so hard to socialize with people of my own age that my school nickname became ‘sociable’. Whilst longing to be friends with them, I would go and stand on my own at break times while they all gathered together. Nobody came and tried to befriend me, as Michael had once done. I stopped doing games and PT because I did not want any other boys to see my operation scars in the showers, even though those that showed most were on my upper thighs and would not readily be connected with an operation on my private parts.

My mother had also changed our surname to avoid all the difficulties my Greek one caused, thinking no-one at my new school would know. However, one boy had come from my old school and told them all my real name, and then accusingly demanded to know why I pretended it was something else now.

As our class was nearly all girls, we took games with Michael’s class every Monday afternoon, and I used to look forward to walking together from the college to Tottenham marshes where the other boys used to play football. On some occasions Michael would make out he was ill so he could spend the whole afternoon with me, for all I used to do was sit on my own while the others played. I hated football, cricket and all sport, and would run away from the ball if forced to play. Once they asked me to be a linesman in football, but I did not know what that meant and cared even less, so just lay down and fell asleep. They never asked me again.
 

When the girls in our class did PT, we boys had to just sit in the boys’ changing room amusing ourselves all afternoon. There was much talk about homosexuality, and David, the boy I had a crush on, used to always have his arm around another boy, who kept telling David how handsome he was, ‘more handsome than Gary’ in the class above, whom I also had a crush on. They used to play strip-poker (though it never went very far, usually just taking off a tie and undoing a few shirt-buttons), and even used to all go in the one toilet cubicle together and lock themselves in. I was not part of any of this and never found out what they did in there, though they came out arguing over who had won. I was loyal in my own way, as one day the PT teacher came in and asked why I was still sitting there thinking the others had gone home, but I never let on they were all in the toilet cubicle together.

The only clue I got as to what they might be doing was during the annual end-of-year dance when they cleared the main hall of chairs and put on rock’n’roll records – one of my rare chances to hear this type of music at the time, for my mother and grandparents disapproved of ‘this awful, rowdy American music for hooligans’. None of the boys were interested in dancing, so the girls jived with each other or teachers. I was sitting on one of the seats along the wall, but behind me a row of chairs had been placed facing the wall just to get them out of the way of the dance floor. David and another boy were sitting in these seats masturbating themselves and measuring their members with rulers to see who had the biggest erection. I glanced over my shoulder and saw what they were doing, pretending to be disgusted at such behavior, though I didn’t say anything and was secretly quite turned on.

On another occasion we were in the changing room with some boys from another class, and two of them were pretending to be wrestling, but were actually having sex with their shorts and vests on, and everyone knew it. They were not gay, because at least one of the boys had a girlfriend. On one occasion my brother and I wrestled in this way, fully clothed, but apart from that the nearest I got to a sexual experience was when one boy pretended to punch me in my private parts, but did it so softly it was almost a grope. I cannot help wondering if I had not been in such a trauma, had made friends and been part of the secret sexual rites, whether I too would have ‘gone through that phase’ and passed on to a heterosexual development.
 

As it was I remembered with regret these lost opportunities for the rest of my life, and then heard about the teenage experiences of George and others. I became very bitter and twisted, especially when I learned that all the places I avoided in my teens were the very places where I could have made contact with the secret gay world. I lived or worked in London, which had the biggest gay scene in the country, yet rarely went to the West End, especially after dark.

We moved to Welwyn Garden City when I was 16, and even though a year later I got a job in London and commuted, I was always at home in Hertfordshire’s suburbia by 6 p.m.. I never entered public toilets, talked to strangers or accepted lifts even in my late teens, and since I had no friends of my own age, I was completely isolated and sexually frustrated. Once, coming home from my grandmother’s bungalow, an attractive young man in a sports car offered me a lift and as I got excited and opened my mouth to say: ‘Yes, thank you very much,’ my automatic pilot took control and the words: ‘No thank you’ came out quite involuntarily. No doubt it saved me from all sorts of dangers, but this brainwashing also prevented me having the fun George and most other gay teenagers enjoyed.

On my fifteenth birthday my best friend, Michael, had died in hospital from injuries sustained when a car hit him while he was crossing a road the night before. I was devastated, because he was my one remaining true friend, having left the others at my old school which I’d left two years previously. All my old school friends lived miles away in Wood Green, and I knew nobody my own age, and so my mother had to invite all my cousins and people from her work or I would have had very few people at my twentyfirst birthday party. Only two people from my work managed to come all the way from London.

My only pal during those lonely teenage years was my brother, Philip, who was four years younger. I immersed myself in the anti-nuclear weapons movement, going on illegal Committee of 100 and legal Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament demonstrations. The illegal ones were more exciting, though I never actually got arrested till the big anti-Vietnam War demo in Grosvenor Square in the late 1960s. I took part in the big 1961 Trafalgar Square sit-down, however, and demonstrations against the visit to London of the fascist Queen Frederika of Greece.

During one of these organized by the Committee of 100 we outflanked police lines blocking off Admiralty Arch and The Mall from Trafalgar Square and charged Buckingham Palace from Piccadilly across Green Park. As the mob reached the high walls of the Palace gardens, demonstrators helped others try to climb over. I got up as far as the huge spikes and thought better of it, though one guy actually got over into the gardens. I don’t know quite what we’d have done if we had all got over, we never actually thought ahead that far.

Committee of 100 demonstrations became very spontaneous and increasingly violent as anarchists and trouble-makers attached themselves and tried to take over. In the beginning they were non-violent, self-disciplined and well organized. I also went on the Aldermaston marches, and ‘Gipsy’ Dave was a neighbor. He was a friend of folk-singer Donovan who lived in nearby Hatfield, and Dave called round to my house one day to ask for details about the Aldermaston March. 

I worked at CND headquarters for 6 years, and on the 1963 Aldermaston March was faced with my boss, CND Organizing Secretary Peggy Duff, trying to stop the March diverting to Warren Row, a few hundred yards off the route, where a Committee of 100 off-shoot, Spies For Peace, had revealed there was a top-secret Regional Seat of Government bunker. I wondered if I would lose my job as I looked at Peggy, then defiantly turned left to go to the forbidden bunker.  A sort of half-hearted sit-down took place on top of the entrance, but most marchers wandered back to the main route after a quick look. In her book, ‘Left, Left, Left’, Peggy later admitted the decision to try to stop the marchers looking at Warren Row was wrong, but CND at the time was a stickler for legality. David Bolton, editor of CND’s newspaper ‘Sanity’, published the location of the RSG, and all the office staff, including myself, had to sit down and go through thousands of copies with a black marker in a vain attempt to obliterate the offending name Warren Row.

The March was famous for its musicians and songs, the most popular of which were the CND ‘anthem’ ‘The H-Bomb’s Thunder’, ‘Ban The Bloody H-Bomb’ (sung with real feeling and gusto), the Scots’ marchers’ ‘Ding Dong Dollar’ (adapted from ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’ and ‘Ye Cannae Shove Your Granny Off A Bus’), plus the Committee of 100s ‘anthem’ ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’.  ‘Why do we always sing that, when we always are moved in the end?’ complained one demonstrator.

I also became treasurer of the local CND group, who were nearly all middle-aged and middle class. My mother was horrified when two women from the local CND group first turned up on our doorstep in response to my application to join. ‘They are all Communists,’ she said, which of course wasn’t true at all. Nearly all the members of my local group were respectable Labour Party members. But my mother had been brought up in a working-class Conservative household of policemen, where anything vaguely anti-Establishment was frowned on as subversive.

So back in the mid-1950s, whilst I was still going to the Saturday morning pictures to watch ‘Flash Gordon’ and sing along with Uncle Bill and his Wurlitzer organ the ‘ABC Minors’ Song’ and the latest hits of the day (‘I Love to Go a Wandering’, ‘Over the Mountains Over the Sea’, etc.), George, only two years older, was already sexually active and beginning some remarkable encounters which will remain just gay sexual fantasies for myself and many others.

Apart from the relationship with his stepbrother, there was a gay encounter with a uniformed soldier in an alley outside a cinema in Glasgow, and he was orally raped by an on-duty London policeman. Although it seems George had a very exciting teenage sexually, it was a hard life, and when you are cold, homeless and hungry, being raped by a policeman and threatened with arrest for vagrancy if you don’t submit can be, as George said, more of a frightening nightmare than a gay fantasy come true.

George had his first gay sexual encounter around 1955, was on the gay scene in Glasgow in his early and mid teens, came on the London gay scene about 1959, meeting me in 1970 after about 15 years of gay experiences. By contrast, I left school in 1961 and had my first sexual experience (gay) in 1967 at the age of 22, so I only had three years experience when we met. No wonder he always seemed a generation older than me, being familiar with a gay London scene I never knew. George was 27 when we met, and although I was 25 in years, in terms of George’s sexual experience I was only 15 sexually, and still very much in the experimental stage when everything was new to me.
 

4. GLASGOW AND GEORGE’S LETTERS TO ROY

While George was a teenager his father died of cancer. Seeing him in Intensive Care with tubes going into his arm and nose was an experience George never got over for the rest of his life, instilling in him an absolute terror of hospitals. He told me once he felt guilty because he could not bear to listen to his father describing the pain he experienced when passing water, and found it very difficult to look at him in that condition.

After their father died, George and his sisters called their stepmother ‘the merry widow’, she seemed so unaffected by her bereavement. George went to live with his father’s sister, Aunty Rose, and her husband Norrie. Because he had no parents, he did not get the opportunity to stay on at school, obtain qualifications and perhaps go to university. He was to regret this later in life, feeling circumstances had deprived him of the education, qualifications and career opportunities he should have had. Certainly he educated himself to university level in literature and the arts, but without qualifications it was useless to him in furthering his career.

All his life George was surrounded by people of a lower intellectual level than himself. This was very frustrating, since he could not debate the finer points of psychology and the arts, which were his favorite subjects. However, he did meet a few people with whom he felt able to discuss such things, and who he did not consider to be ‘piss-elegant snobs’. After coming down to London around 1959/1960, he used to return to Glasgow for lengthy periods, and during these visits he used to write long, intellectual and very witty letters to Roy, a friend he met in London.

Roy was something of an enigma in George’s life. Seemingly a harmless, eccentric character who wore a long, reddish colored wig to hide his baldness and who used to scavenge in skips and dustbins around Notting Hill to find things to sell, Roy also had a sinister side to his nature. He dabbled in the occult and hypnotism, and George claimed he was involved with some revolutionary political group.

According to a letter George wrote his sister Betty, Roy was a very significant figure in this group, and George at one point feared for his life. He seemed to think this group was very powerful, the implication being that it had links with the KGB and, along with CND and other mass protest movements and revolutionary groups, George felt it was all part of a Soviet plot to overthrow democracy in this country. This fear grew into a paranoia, which was fueled by the belief George firmly held to his dying day that Roy and others had hypnotized him whilst he slept in order to make him obey the will of this revolutionary group, to do things which went against his nature. Roy also supplied George and others with amphetamines and possibly other drugs, and I have recently read that an ex-CIA agent said it is possible to hypnotize a suitable subject with the aid of drugs and make them do things normally against their nature, even to assassinate someone.

In the early to mid 1960s, however, George seemed to trust Roy and had an affinity with him regarding films, books and the theater. His letters to Roy all have a very pessimistic flavor about them, indeed George revelled in a negative philosophy.

He wrote things like: ‘I luxuriate in the pathos and tragedy of it all’; ‘If I wasn’t going through the process of self-destruction I don’t know what I’d do. It’s the only thing that keeps me going’;  ‘I shall be pleased to have a letter from you on the condition that you don’t tell me to cheer up…. I enjoy being pessimistic’, finishing up one letter giving his regards to two people ‘As to everyone else, send them my indifference.’

Other quotes from his letters to Roy include: ‘an acquaintance told me my sense of humour was perfectly vile and unbalanced, showing symptoms of instability. Of course I agreed with him entirely…. These remarks produced the desired effect… and my critical acquaintance soon vanished with a vacuous look on his face, never to bother me furthermore with his tedious monologue of conversation’;  ‘If there is no scandal when I return, then I shall certainly make some…. After all, one must give the scandalmongers something to talk about. It’s all they live for.’; ‘There must be something terribly wrong with me today, to feel so gay… a strange symptom and not at all good for my melancholic and pessimistic personality. I do not feel comfortable unless I’m disturbed or unhappy.’

Lamenting  the decline of standards in culture he writes that ‘The peasants… should be treated as… inferior and incapable of dominating the taste of the generation. Only then can art and culture and entertainment be raised to a higher sphere. Until then, we must bear the mediocre trash which is taken for culture today and suffer in silence.’ He discusses the Ibsen play ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ seen at the Glasgow Citizen’s Theater  ‘set in an atmosphere of gloom, grey shadows and death. (Just the right atmosphere for me.)’;”work is the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do… I have no time to go to work. I am far too busy with my life to waste precious golden hours of youth in a factory or stuffy office. I am a lover of freedom’;  ‘I must have conflict in my life, and if I don’t have it, I create it… All this of course is masochistic… I am aware of a deep streak of masochism within me. I like to suffer’; ‘if we see a fault or defect in something, we… cannot ignore it.. so we must point it out.’ This remained true of George all his life, and he suffered for his candidness. People, and especially employers, do not always appreciate having their faults pointed out so bluntly. From George’s point of view he was just giving them good advice, for the benefit of both themselves and others.

Having a short story rejected by a publishing competition he wrote:  ‘The judge/editor informed me that my work had talent, style, insight, wit etc. and urged me to continue practising as I had the necessary ingredients of a writer. However he added that the story I had written was rejected because I “wrote of things which should not be thought of”. He advised me to turn to more common and conventional characters. I admit my story was of unconventional aspect as it dealt with isolationism, sexual impotence, sado-masochistic fantasies, and mental instability… A writer’s job, in my estimation, is to portray the truth, and that was all I did in my story. I only wrote of what I observed or experienced in life. If what I write is harsh, it is because life is harsh. And how dare they advise me to resort to common, conventional themes. All my characters will be individuals, never members of the herd. Conventional people have always bored me and I could never condescend to write about them, not even for financial gain. I can only write of what interests me.’

Discussing his poetry, George admits to being ‘rather shy… The fact is even in my lightest pieces I have put in so much of myself that I am embarrassed to disclose it to a number of people. The themes of my poems and stories are often sombre and they usually end in gloom, loneliness, despair or death. Why? Because that is how life appears to me at the end. Someone once asked me why my poetry was so sad. I could not give an answer, but it is simply this: I cannot paint in a tone of gold what I see in a tone of grey.’

On religion: ‘I believe in God, but I find the Bible too paradoxical to be authentic. For example, I was reading Genesis the other day (looking for faults rather than faith). It states that on the first day there was light, and on the fourth day God made the Sun, Moon and stars. Where did the light come from then on the first day?… The most unreasonable aspect of religion, is its attitude towards sex. How much greater would human happiness be if the gratification of the sexual instinct had never been looked upon as wicked. Sexual shame is the most destructive element in religion, and frequently the cause of neurosis. If you despise the flesh, you distort the soul. Sex is a natural impulse, as common as the desire for food and sleep: it must be satisfied.’

Describing listening to classical music: ‘How often have you heard me say that I am incapable of emotion? Well late this evening, alone in my bedroom I was sitting listening to the radio, and heard Rubinstein playing Chopin. It had been quite some time since I last listened to piano music, and the sound of the delicate ballade made me weep like a fool. It is strange how I can surrender my emotions to a work of art, such as a piece of music, a play, or a film, yet in life I am so cold, aloof and indifferent. If only life were a Chopin ballade. It is difficult to describe how a piece of music can affect the senses. Perhaps it was the tender, delicate playing of Rubinstein, together with the sad, solitary expression of Chopin, which made me cry so silently. It sounded so beautiful, it hurt. I cannot remember ever feeling such a profound sensation before, and I don’t think I could experience it again.
 

‘But I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. I seem sad. Perhaps it’s because of a brief encounter I had when I was out earlier this evening. I accidentally bumped into an attractive boy, as I turned a corner on my way home. (It was entirely my fault. I was doing the gallop.) I apologised, but instead of going on our separate ways we remained looking at each other. He fascinated me, especially his eyes, and he was no more than 18. We both knew – and of course it happened. He walked home part of the way with me afterwards and we had a talk about various things. He was particularly interested in London, and he refused to believe I was Scots, because of my Southern accent. Just talking to him made me feel light-hearted. And then we said goodbye, and went on our separate ways. It all seems so like a dream as I look back on it, three hours or so later. How strange it is. We meet, and then suddenly it seems that we must part forever. But that is the way of the twilight world. There is no love. Of course he means nothing to me in retrospect. Already the features of his face have blurred in my memory. But I cannot help wondering what life will do to him. In the twilight world, we call it a gay life. And it is a gay life, yet a terrible one too, because there is no love… I cannot love… I will always be a stranger… a little in love with death, since death is the ultimate escape from time… I did not mean to be so egotistical… only I can understand what I am trying to express in words.’
 

On literature:  ‘“Of Human Bondage” by Wm. Somerset Maugham… is his greatest work and deserves to be called a masterpiece.’

In both Glasgow and London George went ‘on the game’, becoming what is now known as a ‘rent boy’ in order to survive. He has told me of the times he earned money ‘on the bash’ in Glasgow to give to his sister and her large family. On one occasion he bought a couple of rashers of bacon with some money he had earned, and after the kids had been fed and were tucked up in bed, George and his sister Betty fried the two rashers for a special midnight treat. As the delicious smell of bacon wafted through the house, one of the children got up and wandered into the kitchen to investigate the smell, obviously hoping for a ‘piece’n’ham’ (Glaswegian slang for a bacon sandwich).

‘Maw, I’m thirsty. Can I hae a drink of water?’ whined the little girl, eyeing the frying pan and sniffing hopefully. She was given the glass of water and promptly chased back to bed by George and Betty.

‘I had to wank off an old man for that bacon’, said George to me years later, ‘I wasn’t going to let some spoiled little brat have it. I could only afford two rashers.’

George’s London flat-mate, John the lorry driver, was a regular client, and George eventually moved into his furnished room in Belgrave Road, Victoria. In Glasgow George received from John a letter saying he had put George’s friend and fellow hustler Rose up for the night. ‘He said nothing happened between them, which I shall pretend to believe when I write back to John, but I am not so foolish to swallow such a statement’, wrote George. ‘I know John, and I know Rose and I know what happened when he took her back….. If I find out she has been trespassing on my property or offering her services at reduced prices I shall be furious. I’ve no time for ten-bob boots or shuck-ups. Some people will do it for peanuts.’

George then gives a description of the Glasgow gay scene and some of its more colorful characters:

‘There are several gay pubs and two coffee-bars up here where the gay crowd congregate, usually at weekends. I know almost everyone in this twilight world, and it amuses them all to hear of how bold the bitches are in London. Of course I tell them about the gay people we encounter in London, such as Rose, Daphne, Mad Myra, Gwen, Fifi, Red Riding Hood and Nellie the Elephant; everyone thinks I’m exaggerating when I describe the behaviour of these bitches.

‘Of course, there are several “star personalities” in the twilight world here too, who make their dramatic entrances in the gay circles. Perhaps it would amuse you to have a description of some of them. I shall start with the bitches.

‘Dandelion. A bitch about 28 years old, although she pretends to be 24. An acidulous creature, and as vain as Fifi. Don’t ask me how she got her name.

‘Glamorous Gladys. A hideous old queen who does drag numbers. A flamboyant extrovert. Of course she and I hated each other instinctively from the first moment we set eyes on each other.

‘Arabella. A bitch of 24, who likes everyone to think she is wicked. A regular whore who sometimes hustles in drag, but she is basically a likeable individual.

‘Fidgety Flo. A middle-aged queen who is a registered drug-addict. She has a “twitch” and as her name implies, she fidgets frequently. Her movements are nervous and her smile a contortion. Rather pathetic creature.

‘Talulah. A twenty year old bitch, who looks “bona” in drag. She has a mouth like a manhole and can hardly stop talking. She’s a good laugh though.

‘Gumsy Grace. A vile old queen with no teeth. An alcoholic. Keeps to herself but she’s “all eyes”. Scandal says she’s a copper’s nark.

‘Mad Hilda. Aged about 28-30. Egocentric. Lives in fantasy-world of her own making.

‘Short-sighted Cynthia. Aged 22. As blind as a bat but she won’t wear spectacles. She has to peer into your face when she wants to recognise you. She can’t distinguish between a handsome young bloke or a hideous old geezer, so she finds it hard to make conquests.

‘Every month there is a drag show at the “El Guerro”. This month, three mental bitches did drag numbers. Talulah sang “I’m a Woman”. Arabella sand “I’m the Whore of Paradise Alley”. Glamorous Gladys (that lovely lady) added a bit of vulgarity as she sang “I Love Him On The Whole”.

‘What a “drag” show. It was out of this world. The performers looked like 3 painted whores who had dried up. Watching them was like a fantasy in nightmare surrealism. When Glamorous Gladys finished her number I whispered (loud enough for Gladys to hear) “Pathetic”. “You’re only jealous” she retaliated. Imagine me being jealous of an ugly old boot about 60, with the most monstrous mouth on Earth. Later in the evening as I made my exit, I passed her, looked piteously into her face and quoted a phrase from Richard III “Poor painted queen”. She was fuming.’

On the pop music of the day, he writes of The Rolling Stones latest number one hit ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ describing it as ‘terrific’.
 

Apart from these letters to Roy, written after George had already made his permanent home in London, I have very little idea of his late teenage years in Glasgow. He worked for a while in an office of a company which made galvanized corrugated iron sheets I believe, a phrase he remembered because he had written or typed it out so often. He also worked in a solicitor’s office either in Glasgow or when he first came down to London, work which he found quite interesting.

As to the gay scene in Glasgow I know little apart from what I quoted above. From the age of 12 or 13 he seems to have met partners in Glasgow cottages, cinemas and other places. It seems he always headed straight for wherever he was warned not to go.

George lived life to the full from a very early age, reading the classics, seeing plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, etc., enjoying classical music and seeing good films. In view of his working-class background in the cultural desert of Glasgow tenements and housing schemes, amidst a family and environment where nobody shared any of these interests, it is all the more remarkable.

That someone could develop such an intellectual understanding of culture, the arts and human psychology without a college or university education, in such unpromising surroundings, just reinforces my belief in some sort of reincarnation. George must surely have first learnt to appreciate these things via a previous life of his Soul Group.

It must have been shortly after his father died that George first made his way down to London, probably by hitching. Certainly he hitched there and back many times, exploring cities like Manchester en route. However, he told me of one occasion when he was traveling on the London-Glasgow all night coach and found himself sitting next to an attractive youth near the back. Blankets were supplied on these coaches, and George said quite a lot of hanky-panky went on between him and this boy underneath the blankets whilst the rest of the passengers slept a few feet away quite unaware. Yet another gay fantasy which George actually experienced.

Before going to London, his family pleaded with him to stay in Glasgow. London was a dangerous place, they told him. Above all, if he must go, he should at all costs stay away from wicked Soho.

True to his nature, George arrived in London – and promptly headed straight for Soho.

5. THE ‘SWINGING SIXTIES’ IN LONDON

Having arrived in London, George eventually found himself a furnished room near Clapham North tube station. He easily took the ‘culture shock’ in his stride, adapting to the London life-style as though born to it. He soon discovered ‘Harrington’s’ pie and mash shop in the Wandsworth Road, which remained a favorite eating establishment of his till the day he died. As well as pie and mash, he lapped up all the arts and culture London had to offer – the theater, opera, art galleries, cinema as well as the libraries.

In search of the Royal Shakespeare Company soon after his arrival in London, he once ventured on the Central Line as far east as Stratford before realizing the East End London district was not Stratford-upon-Avon. From a Glasgow perspective, both Stratfords are way down South and therefore not easily distinguishable.

Speakers’ Corner at Marble Arch became a favorite haunt of George’s, where he met most of his friends and acquaintances, including those who remained friends throughout his life, becoming mine too. Gay men from the provinces tended to congregate there, and in Fortes’ tea rooms across the road in Oxford Street.

He explored Soho and the West End, finding Piccadilly Circus and the surrounding area one of the most exciting places imaginable. He once told me of a film which first determined him to come to London. It was called ‘John and Julie’ and was made in color in 1955, all about two children who run away to London to see the Coronation. George would have only been 12 at the time, but the images of the capital in that film stayed with him till they became reality for him about 4 years later.
 

Times were often very hard for George. In those days, you were evicted from furnished rooms if the landlord or landlady found out you were gay, so George was frequently homeless and had to ‘do skippers’, slang for sleeping rough. With no job, he was too proud and independent to seek National Assistance, as Social Security was then called. The only time he did apply, homeless and literally starving, he was refused any help. He was thus forced to go ‘on the game’ as he had done occasionally in Glasgow, and at Marble Arch many of the others were also part of the male hustling ‘sisterhood’.

George was warned to steer clear of a male hustler with bleached blond hair known as ‘Rose’, who was thought to be trouble. True to his nature, George immediately sought out Rose and they struck up a life-long friendship. As very close friends in a platonic sense, they shared many hard times together.

In a furnished room in Islington where George once lived, he and Rose sometimes sneaked in ‘clients’, but they had to perform to the accompaniment of nails being banged into coffins from the neighboring undertakers. Rose went one further when he went back with a client to a shack on some wasteland near London Airport. On opening the door, there in the center of the room was an open casket, and the client told Rose to get in. Thinking his number was up, Rose did as he was told, keeping his legs over the sides in case the client tried to slam the lid shut on him. However, after helping him fulfil his necrophiliac fantasies, Rose was generously paid and driven back to the West End safe and sound, but a little wiser and more cautious in future. On another occasion a client had a heart attack and died on top of Rose whilst they were ‘on the job’ in an hotel bedroom. Rose left, and apparently told the desk clerk not to bother with bringing the occupant of the room breakfast in bed.
 

Sometimes George had to hide in a cupboard whilst Rose did business with a client, and on one occasion George hid beneath the bed passing jam sandwiches up to Rose who ate them surreptitiously without the client noticing. They were both often starving, and Rose lived in a coal cellar off the Bayswater Road for a time. He had to arrive late at night and leave early in the morning so the residents of the house did not see him sneaking up and down the steps from the street leading to the basement area where the cellar was located.

George knew a gay vicar at St Martins-in-the-Fields, and sometimes when they had nowhere else to go they were allowed to sleep in the pews of the church after it had been locked up for the night. This was before the homeless were offered shelter in the crypt. They used to wash in the font in the morning. Rose knew another gay vicar who was a client of his in Kensington. A pop star of the day was also one of his regular clients.

Having both been taken back to a posh hotel by one client, they were leaving early the next morning, Rose wearing worn-out winkle-picker shoes with holes in the soles which let in water. As they were walking along the hotel corridor, they saw pairs of shoes left outside the doors overnight for cleaning. Coming across an expensive pair of brogues which looked about Rose’s size, he tried them on and found they fitted perfectly. They often wondered what havoc the guest in that room must have created with the hotel management when they received back a pair of scuffed old winkle-pickers full of holes.

One cold night when they had nowhere to stay, George and Rose discovered an unlocked basement with some boilers which ran the central heating system for the building. They crept behind these so no-one could discover them, and fell asleep hugging each other for warmth.

Next morning they crept out of the basement, and as they got out into the streets around Bayswater, people seemed to be staring at them. George looked at Rose and immediately saw why: his face was black as the proverbial soot which was covering it, and his shoulder length blond hair and clothes were also contaminated. George was in a similar state, his red hair blackened with soot. They quickly made for Notting Hill Gate tube station where they cleaned up in the gents’ washroom.

The male hustlers used to strike up close friendships with some of the girls on the game, and on one occasion two of the women had a voyeuristic client who just wanted to watch them ‘perform’ with another man. The girls asked George and Rose if they would be willing to simulate heterosexual sex with them for the benefit of the client, but George could not bring himself to even pretend to do something so against his nature, so he kept look-out by the door of the hotel room, whilst Rose put on a show with the two female prostitutes, and apparently the client was quite happy even though Rose was unable to even get aroused.

However, on another occasion Rose actually did manage to impregnate a female prostitute who wanted to have a baby, something George could never speak about to me except to say that Rose was more butch than he acted and had ‘betrayed’ his sexual orientation, or words to that effect. After George died Rose let it slip out in an unguarded moment that he had a son he had never met presumably walking around somewhere, 
 

In those days it was easy to get clients. Just walking slowly up the Bayswater Road in a pair of white trousers was sufficient. George always prided himself on giving value for money, and even when homeless and starving, not having eaten for several days, he had his principles, never taking from a client more than he knew they could afford.

Some of the characters George and Rose knew in those days are only names to me – Red Riding Hood, Ginger Terry, Angel, Mother, Miss Smith. Other camp names read more like a shopping list: Coffee, Sugar, Tangerine, for example. The latter was short of stature and lived in West Ham. He would sit in the gardens in Leicester Square doing his knitting in the mornings waiting for Rose and George. He always brought apples and sandwiches, which they ate together.

Some of the camp bitches I actually met, like Nellie the Elephant, Fifi, Mad Myra and Big Bertha.  We ran into Mad Myra, who originally came from Glasgow like George, off the Edgware Road one day early in our relationship. George rushed us away before Myra could let slip that they both used to be male hustlers. George and I once ran into Bertha as we walked along Park Lane late one evening. He was strolling in Hyde Park by the railings, his large frame clothed in a sort of ankle length white smock, like some fallen angel.

‘The police have just pulled me dear,’ he told George. ‘They asked me what I was doing in the Park at this time of night, and I told them I was looking for a man.’

Most bitches were more discreet, but many spent time in jail, including some of George’s close friends. Somehow George managed to avoid this experience. Our friend Lena we visited in Pentonville, my one and only visit to a prison. Rose was once arrested in drag along with some female prostitutes and ended up in Holloway (women’s) Prison, before they discovered he was a man.

Rose was conscripted into the Army in the days of National Service, despite telling them he was gay. He claims he had a whale of a time sleeping in a different barrack bed every night till the Army threw him out. ‘Well I told you I was gay, but you wouldn’t believe me’ was Rose’s response.

In the days before the 1967 Act of Parliament which partly legalized homosexuality, gays had their own language known as the ‘polari’ with which they could safely converse in public. It was introduced to the general public by the characters ‘Jules and Sandy’ played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick on radio’s ‘Round The Horne’, but George told me the meaning of many of these funny sounding words. A passive or effeminate gay man was an ‘homy-polone’, ‘HP’ or ‘bitch’. A ‘polone’ was a real woman, and ‘sharpies’ or ‘lily law’ were the police. The language was a mixture of Italian (such as ‘manjari’ for food, ‘capella’ for hat), theatrical slang and backward pronunciation – such as ‘ecaf’ or ‘eek’ for ‘face’. Words like ‘naff’ and ‘cod’ for something unattractive have now passed into more general usage. I have since learnt that ‘naff’ actually stood for ‘not available for fucking’, meaning a totally straight man. So ‘he’s naff’ would mean the guy was unobtainable for gay sex.

George and Rose once lived near each other in Bayswater, George sharing a room with a female prostitute named Roxy. Rose shared with fellow male hustler Sugar, who wore a white polka dot flying jacket with black stars on it. Nearby was either the old American embassy or some building attached to it, and Rose and George sometimes got G.I.s from this building as clients. They would take them back to George’s rooming house and sneak them into either the big bathroom or the toilet, trying to avoid Roxy’s boyfriend who took potshots at the clients with his airgun. American G.I.s were fine, but Australians were apparently bad payers, according to Rose, though Roxy’s friend Meat-Cleaver Kate (so called because her face resembled this implement) went with them, glad of any business she could get.
 

One evening Rose and George were walking in Hyde Park when they spotted Coffee sitting on a seat with a client, who was panicking and called to them for help. They discovered Coffee had fallen into a deep sleep, being thoroughly exhausted from the effect of drugs and lack of sleep. He had actually fallen asleep with his hand firmly clasped round the client’s member in the middle of giving him a hand-job, and no amount of shaking or shouting could wake Coffee up. The client was frantic in case the police came along and found him in this compromising position, so George and Rose with great difficulty eventually managed to prise Coffee’s hand open, but apparently they almost had to break his fingers to do it.

Not all the bitches who congregated at Marble Arch were on the game, and though the hustlers sometimes criticized those who ‘gave it away for nothing’, there was a camaraderie between all those who met up at Speakers’ Corner, both gay and straight. George often spoke fondly of Aggie, an elderly religious woman who, bible in hand, spoke there for years.

One day George and Rose were talking with an attractive acquaintance at Marble Arch, and a friend of theirs whose real name was Arthur kept saying to Rose:

‘Introduce me to your friend’.

In the end Rose momentarily interrupted his conversation with the young man to gesture impatiently with his thumb over his shoulder to Arthur, saying by way of introduction in an annoyed tone:

‘Oh, this is Nellie the Elephant.’

One of their acquaintances around this time was Quentin Crisp, who then lived in a room off the Tottenham Court Road. They used to go back to his room and chat, or sip tea together in a cafe. George was something of a wit himself, and kept a book of his own and other people’s philosophical, funny and clever quotations, so he must have enjoyed Quentin’s company. One of my favorites from George’s book is the following:

‘The only time I was ever in bed with a woman was when I was born.’

London was full of characters in those days, but now, like Mr Crisp in his latter years, they only seem to be found in New York.

George and another friend from Marble Arch, Lena, used to sometimes drag up for fun, or to go to drag balls. George looked very pretty in drag – he had a small face, and with make-up and a wig could easily pass as a woman. Some bitches regularly hustled in drag, and two I later got to know had both adopted French-sounding names – Fifi and Andre. When George was in drag he went by the name of Gina, short for Georgina of course.

Close as George and Rose were, they often fell out with each other, but it never lasted long. There was the time Rose stole George’s Christmas pudding from the larder, an incident George often told me about. The strange thing is George never really liked Christmas pudding. In later years Rose’s partner, Neil, regularly made whole batches of enormous, rich, traditional Christmas puddings and George and I always got one, so I think Rose’s debt has been repaid many times over.
 

On one occasion when George had a room just behind Leicester Square in Lisle Street (now part of Chinatown), Rose arrived late at night outside with a client but George would not open the door. Impatiently Rose bawled up at his window: ‘Open up, you fucking cow, I know you’re in there.’  So George got evicted from another furnished room.

Just around the corner in Gerrard Street (now the main street of Chinatown) above a shop on the corner of Macclesfield Street was ‘Bobby’s Bar’, a sort of early gay disco. This was one of the places George and Rose regularly frequented, to dance to the hits of the day. There were many other gay ‘dives’ in Soho, and also out in places like Chelsea and The Angel. Some were sleazy, some were so packed you could not move. Things went on then which, until the 1990s when unofficial ‘backrooms’ sprung up in many gay venues, would never have been tolerated so openly in the supposedly enlightened 70s and 80s.

George often said that as soon as the 1967 Sexual Offences Act was passed supposedly legalizing homosexuality under certain very restricted circumstances, the big clampdown started. Only insipid, respectable gay establishments were allowed under this Act, so all the rest had to be closed down, especially since they were now advertised in the new gay press. Before the 1967 Act only the initiated few knew of the existence of the various gay venues, so they got away with more. Other countries in Europe, and many states in the USA and Australia, had much more tolerant laws than our own, so Britain seems to be the only place where supposedly gay liberation directly brought about the closure of many venues where gay men used to meet.
The Biograph cinema in Victoria was one such place, and it was there I later met George. It vied with the Electric cinema in Portobello Road for the title of Britain’s oldest cinema. The Biograph opened in 1905, and was a meeting place for gay men for many decades till it was suddenly demolished without warning in the early 1980s. Sunday afternoons it would be packed out, and you would see a long line of men queuing outside before it opened. The innocent passer-by must have often wondered why two mediocre old films were so popular.

There used to be continuous shows consisting of two films with short intervals in between. There were no adverts, cartoons, trailers, shorts or newsreels. When it closed, a lot of people found their whole lives disrupted, with nowhere to go on Sunday afternoons, and the main London ‘social club’ for meeting other gay men gone. The things that went on in the dark rows of shaking seats were quite outrageous, but nobody minded, except perhaps the woman who walked out one day with white stuff all over her hat which wasn’t dropped by a passing pigeon, according to George, who saw how it got there from the row behind where she was sitting quite oblivious to what was going on around her. The staff all knew, from Flo in the Box Office to Tubby who sold ice-creams between films and shouted out: ‘Half-time, change partners’, or even more boldly: ‘Half-time, change hands’.

Even the police knew what went on there, and turned a blind eye. They have been known to tell gay men caught in the act in Victoria Station toilets to ‘go down the road to the Biograph if you want to do that sort of thing.’

So the sixties certainly ‘swung’ for George, Rose and many others, but this was not the case for all of us.

6. THE REBELLIOUS SIXTIES AND DISCOVERING THE GAY SCENE

For me the 1960s did not start swinging until very late, eight years into the decade in fact. I diverted my repressed sexual desires into first the anti-nuclear weapons and anti-war movement, and later into other leftwing causes, culminating in becoming a member of the hardline, Stalinist factions of the YCL (Young Communist League) and later the Communist Party itself. There were lots of reasons for this regression from pacifism to Stalinism, not least disillusionment with the Wilson Labour government elected in 1964 which then betrayed all its promises. The Vietnam War also confused the simple anti-nuclear weapons and anti-war stance of the peace movement, as many leftwingers sympathized strongly with the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) and took sides with them against what they saw as a U.S. imperialist war. I also came into contact, at CND office where I worked, with several Communist Party members and sympathizers, and was undoubtedly influenced by them.

Another very influential factor in my becoming a Communist was my first two trips abroad, both thanks to CND and both to Socialist countries. In 1966 I ventured out of the UK for the very first time on Youth CND’s ‘Project 67′ holiday by train to Moscow and Leningrad, passing thru East Germany and Poland on the way. I was very impressed by the Soviet Union, and by what little I saw of East Berlin from the train window. One of my traveling companions, who must have influenced me a lot, was a middle-aged Greek-Cypriot Communist tailor named Nicos whose lifelong ambition had been to visit Moscow and he lavishly praised almost everything we saw. Seeing a new housing estate as we passed thru West Germany he pointed excitedly out of the window and exclaimed:

‘Look at those new houses, it must be East Germany, the workers’ paradise,’ but he said very little when we saw the grim reality of the actual border with its fences and watchtowers, except to express deep disappointment that the border guards of the German Democratic Republic didn’t speak Greek, ‘the international language’ according to Nicos. In Russia itself, he refused to pay his fare on any of the buses, saying ‘tourists go free in the workers’ paradise’. He got very dirty looks from other passengers dropping their fares into the ‘honesty boxes.’

Two years later, as a leaving present from CND headquarters where I had worked for six years, I and Sheila, another staff member who was leaving, were offered a free holiday in the GDR (East Germany) courtesy of the East German Peace Council (Friedensrat der DDR). These invitations were sent to British trade unionists, peace groups, etc. every year. Sheila and I had little money and hitched most of the way to Berlin and back. We arrived a few days before the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. I was very impressed with everything I saw in the GDR, not least its extremely open and liberated gay scene at that time. It was so open, even straight members of our delegation noticed it and remarked on it. I met someone in an outrageous gay coffee bar next to the ‘G’ (pronounced ‘gay’) Bar pub, and as we walked hand-in-hand down Friedrichstrasse without anyone blinking an eyelid, he stopped a woman in the street and asked her to translate for him: ‘Your friend wants to know if it’s OK for him to come back and spend the night with you in your hotel,’ she said, quite unembarrassed. I replied: ‘Yes,’ and so had a very pleasant night. In London at the time I could have been arrested for walking down the street hand-in-hand with another man, and certainly for what went on in the Mocca coffee bar in Friedrichstrasse. The charge would have been ‘public indecency’ or something similar.

In 1966 on my first visit to the Soviet Union I had been a Labour Party member, fast becoming disillusioned with the Wilson government. After my trip I soon decided I might as well leave the Labour Party, who called each other ‘comrade’, were committed by their Constitution to ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ and who sung ‘The Red Flag’ promising to keep it flying here but didn’t carry out Socialism when in government. I decided, therefore, to join the real thing.

It did not seem such a great leap of ideology, just switching to a Party which intended to practice what it preached from one which didn’t. So I became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, or to be precise, initially its youth wing, the Young Communist League. We used to meet in an outhouse of a huge, affluent West Hampstead mansion, where Ann, the daughter of the occupants, lived with her Irish boyfriend. We were a hardline Stalinist faction within the YCL, and anti-Stalinists called Ann ‘Madame Mao’, a name she detested being pro-Soviet and anti-Maoist.
 

I was already a hardline Stalinist by my second foreign trip in 1968, and I was overjoyed at the news that revisionist Czechoslovakia had been invaded by East Germany, the Soviet Union and three other Warsaw Pact countries. As a member of a CND delegation I had to button my lip somewhat, but Sheila was well aware of my views and said that I would make excellent cannon fodder for Nazism or Communism, I was so gullible. Even the British Peace Committee delegates (the BPC was a Communist-front peace organization, part of the Soviet led World Peace Council) followed the British Communist line and condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The British Communist daily, The Morning Star, was unavailable in the GDR after the invasion because of its anti-Soviet line.

I returned from the GDR in 1968 glowing with praise for that country, which from then on I saw as the ideal Socialist state, ‘a steel fortress of Socialism’ as I described it. As VIP visitors we had been guests of honor on the platform of a huge political rally in Marx-Engels Platz in East Berlin, which ostensibly was to condemn Germany’s Nazi past but in practice was a justification for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. We were also taken on a tour of the Brandenburg Gate and nearby ‘anti-fascist wall’ or ‘Wall of Peace’, where we climbed a dais with a GDR National People’s Army officer and stared at Westerners a few yards away on a similar dais near the Reichstag staring back at us. It was very surrealistic.

I was so impressed with my visit to the GDR, not least by the extremely liberated 1968 gay scene in East Berlin, that the GDR became my model Socialist society, and I wrote my GDR hosts in the Peace Council for a color picture of the Stalinist GDR leader Walter Ulbricht, which then had pride-of-place in my bedroom for years.
 

The influence of all these events and the people I came into contact with drove me into the arms of the YCL and CP, and Stalin to me appeared a sort of heroic, father figure who had tried to bring about a new golden age of Communist equality and justice by brute force. George analyzed me later and said I needed something bigger than myself to believe in.

I regularly listened to the English-language broadcasts of Radio Moscow, Radio Tirana (Albania), Radio Prague and Radio Berlin International (East Germany), and lapped up their propaganda.

This complete surrender to a higher authority warped my true pacifist beliefs, so that I was willing to justify war and even some of Stalin’s purges as being ‘for the good of the cause’. I told myself that ‘the end justifies the means’. A very perceptive woman instructor on a GPO training course, who became familiar with my Stalinist and pro-capital punishment views of the time, told me I was very bitter, and that I would meet someone and fall in love eventually, be it a man or a woman, and my views would change. She was absolutely right. It was as though this warped, bitter period of my life was a direct result of being starved of romantic/sexual love and affection all thru my adolescence and well into my twenties.

In 1967 the Sexual Offences Act was passed which legalized homosexuality in certain very restricted and closely defined circumstances. In effect it only legalized it for gay male couples over 21 already in a committed relationship and living together. Basically, all gay sex between men remained illegal unless they were both over 21, neither were serving in the armed forces and they magically found themselves alone together in a self-contained residence. Virtually any way they could possibly meet and indicate to each other they were sexually interested remained  illegal until the 21^st Century, and if a third person was present anywhere in the residence an offense was still being committed even if the two men were in a locked bedroom. This meant the type of gay clubs with backrooms (legal all over Europe, in the US, Australia and elsewhere) remained illegal in Britain, despite their 1990s flourishing in London and some other cities. They then still had to be undercover and surreptitious as the police could close them down at any time, so purpose built backrooms with proper facilities such as private cubicles and safe sex material did not exist here right into the 21^st Century.

Moreover, backrooms could not be openly advertised as such, so only those on the gay scene knew of their existence. Those on the fringes of the gay world were therefore still forced into the few remaining public toilets and dangerous open spaces.  Any attempt to approach another man with a view to a sexual or romantic relationship was still deemed ‘importuning for an immoral purpose’ and ‘pretty policemen’ were sent out to entrap gay men and make easy arrests. Not until the 21^st Century were these laws liberalized, due largely to EU decrees outlawing discrimination.

Despite the very limited and grudging nature of the law change, the 1967 Act was justly hailed as a great reform if only because it ended the ‘blackmailers’ charter’ by which all gay men could be threatened with being handed over to the law if they did not pay up. It also prevented gay couples being evicted just for living together.

The publicity surrounding the change in the law was considerable, and the London ‘Evening Standard’ published a series of articles on homosexuality, with descriptions of how gay men met each other in various locations around the capital. I read all this with avid interest and growing frustration, for all the locations were described in tantalizing detail but were not identified. I read of a cinema ‘where you cannot see the film for men getting up and leaving in pairs’ and of a wood in North London popular with less attractive gay men because it was dark, and I felt more miserable and isolated than ever. Here was I at 22, still a virgin and, as far as I knew, I had never even met another gay man, yet all around me other gay men were apparently having a whale of a time because they knew about the secret places this newspaper reporter had somehow sought out. I had no way of knowing the cinema was the Biograph in Victoria or the wood was located on Hampstead Heath and visited by gay men at night.

On a holiday with my mother in Blackpool that summer we were sitting on the beach and she started daydreaming aloud about when I got married and had children, and what sort of girl I might marry. I then told her I did not think I would ever marry, and in my stumbling way told her I was attracted to men and not women, but that I had never acted out my desires. I told her I was totally isolated and did not know how to meet others like myself. My mother had a gay boss at the time who lived with his partner, and I actually asked my mother if she could ask him for advice as to where I could meet other gay men.

It is possibly the only time a gay man has asked his mother to put him in touch with the gay scene, but I was absolutely desperate. For nine long years, all thru my teenage since I was 13, I had kept my sexuality repressed. Now I knew there was an active gay world out there and I really was not the only one, I had to find this secret world somehow. Of course, before the ‘Standard’ articles were published I knew homosexuals existed, but I had no idea how common they were or that places where they met existed in London. I used to sometimes sit alone rather than with friends on buses to and from school in the vain hope that a homosexual would sit next to me and make advances. I was so naive it did not even enter my head to go into a public toilet, where I would have stood far more chance of making contact, nor to seek out bars and cinemas in the West End on the off chance of hitting the right one at the right time.

Some years before there had been stories in my local paper in Welwyn Garden City about ‘Queers in the Woods’, which people at work were talking and laughing about. I was so naive I rushed over to the wood in question on my bike in broad daylight, took a brisk walk thru wheeling my bicycle, and rode home again thinking the news stories were all nonsense. It never occurred to me to go after dusk without my bike and hang around, walking slowly. Also I used to dress and wear my hair in a most unattractive manner, influenced by my mother. Sexy clothes such as jeans and tee-shirts were simply not in my wardrobe. It was short-back-and sides, jacket and trousers, collar and tie for me all thru my teens and beyond.

Eventually I chanced upon an American gay  magazine on a stall near Euston station, and even that took courage to buy it after walking by several times. It contained an advert for a gay guide and I eventually got a list of places, including those in my home city of London. It was a very round-about way of breaking into the secret gay world, but in those days there was no gay press in this country and no gay guides of any sort.

So at last I had my magic key to the secret gay world which had eluded me so long, but the lock was not easy to open. To begin with the guide was not very accurate, and I wasted a lot of time trying to find places listed in King’s Cross, London, England but which were, in fact, in King’s Cross , Sydney, Australia. The bars I did find were very disappointing. Quite often only one bar was gay, often upstairs, and I inevitably went to the wrong bar. I also went at the wrong time – far too early in the evening, or even at lunchtime. I was also dressed completely wrong, and any gay person would have assumed a ‘straight’ person had walked into the bar by mistake.

In actual fact, gay bars and clubs in London are extremely difficult places to make initial contacts, or so I have found, unless you have the knack of making eye contact. I do not have this knack, people do not recognize me as gay (I have been challenged by bouncers on the doors of gay pubs accusing me of being ‘straight’) and I wouldn’t know how to chat-up or respond to a chat-up line anyway. I find it quite impossible to make eye contact. If a stranger looks me in the eye, my reflex action is to immediately look away.

I tried visiting a few gay clubs listed in the guide, but could not gain access. Even after the 1967 Act was passed, the gay clubs were very difficult to get into. You had to be introduced by a member, and if you knew nobody who was even gay, let alone a member, you were barred from entry or joining the club. Too many plainclothes police tried to gain access to these clubs in order to make easy arrests. All you had to do was offer to buy a plainclothes policeman a drink in a gay club or bar, or smile at him even, and you could be arrested for ‘importuning for an immoral purpose’.

Eventually, working my way down the Lavender World list, I tried the Biograph cinema in Victoria, which was where I was to meet George three years later. I immediately made a mistake by sitting the ‘wrong’ side of the auditorium. The lefthand side, looking towards the screen, was where most of the activity took place. I sat on the right, where the older men and heterosexuals who just wanted to see the films tended to sit.

However, after a few minutes I became aware of the leg of the man next to me coming into contact with mine. At first I thought it was accidental, but it continued and I could feel a definite pressure. It led to my very first real sexual encounter, and was not very exciting or memorable. He was a middle-aged, bald-headed Italian, and after a few minutes’ fumbling in the darkened cinema he got up and went to the gents or moved elsewhere. However, to me, although nothing had really happened apart from some groping, it was wonderful because I knew my years of enforced isolation, frustration and celibacy were over. I now knew where to go and what to do. I changed seats and soon found the lefthand side of the auditorium was much better. At the age of 22 I had finally started experimenting with sex, about 10 years after most other people, gay or straight.

Over the next few weeks I had several quick sexual encounters in that cinema, and eventually someone actually arranged a date with me to meet again. He was due to play piano at a social club opposite a council estate in Camden Town. As it happens this was the very estate I was to live with my mother and George in a few years’ time. I sat in the background as his guest whilst he did his stint, and afterwards we went to Victoria and booked into a Red Shield Hotel, run by the Salvation Army. It was a proper hotel, not a hostel for down-and-outs, but it was reasonably priced. That was the first time I went to bed or stayed overnight with a man, and so could be described as where I first really lost my virginity.

Over the next few months I acquired a Swiss boyfriend, who lived in West Kensington. I had met him in the Biograph too, and I stayed overnight at his place several times. What my mother thought of my suddenly staying out all night I do not know, but I was 22, and I knew it was time I left Welwyn Garden City and moved back to London to a place of my own.

 
In early 1968, at my mother’s suggestion, I tried moving into a spare room in my father’s flat in Hampstead, but soon realized it was a mistake. My grandmother was upset and said it would hurt my mother after she brought me up, for me to leave her to go and live with my father. Of course, it was not like that at all – I just wanted to live in London, and it was mother’s idea to move into my Dad’s flat. However, she was always saying things she did not really mean and regretting it later, and so I frantically searched for a room of my own. I found a terrible place in Stoke Newington, and took it out of desperation. My father was furious when he found out I was moving, since my mother had left him suddenly 17 years before and he felt history was repeating itself. I tried to explain that my grandmother was not happy with the arrangement, and I thought it was also upsetting my mother. I would rather be completely independent, then they could not say I favored one rather than the other.

The Stoke Newington room, above a tire shop, was in fact half a room divided by a plyboard partition. You could hear every noise thru it, although I never did discover who lived a few inches away in the other half of the room. My mother visited me there several times and thought it was awful, and a fire hazard with all those rubber tires stored below. When she came she had to sit on the bed, and if she stretched out her legs they touched the dividing wall and blocked the door. There was just room for the bed, a washbasin, a little Belling cooker, a chair and chest of drawers.

I was rescued a few months later when I met Kenny, an Irishman from Armagh. Needless to say, I met him in the Biograph, for I did not go to any other gay places. He had a large room in Camden High Street, and said the room next to his would become vacant very soon. Meanwhile I could move in with him. So I did, and we spent some happy times together. He was my second real boyfriend, and my first serious affair.

David, his very attractive next door neighbor, was not gay. He was very active in the Socialist Labour League, a Trotskyist organization which later became the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, and Kenny also supported them. David and I used to have arguments because I was an out-and-out Stalinist member of the Communist Party, their sworn enemy. I liked David nevertheless. Eventually he did move out, and I took over his room, decorating it with Maoist posters I bought in the Chinese political bookshop (run by an Albanian) a few doors down the High Street.

This was really my first live-in affair. The top floor of the rooming house was almost like a self-contained flat with Kenny’s large bed-sitting room and my smaller one next to it, each with a washbasin, and a shared little Belling cooker on the landing outside. To reach our two rooms and little ‘kitchen’ there was a door at the top of the stairs. We had to go down one flight for the communal toilet and bathroom.

I have happy memories of listening to records with Kenny, particularly a Marilyn Monroe album of songs from her movies, and of eating Chinese sweet and sour pork dishes from a nearby take-away. He didn’t want me to leave him soon after we met and go on my holiday to East Germany, but I wasn’t going to turn down a free holiday and the adventure of a lifetime to a country I had been longing to visit since a brief glimpse from a train two years before.
 

Our relationship seemed to work OK, though naturally I got teased about my musical tastes. In 1964 I had belatedly discovered 1950s rock’n’roll via two Granada TV shows, one featuring Little Richard and the other Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis. I had recently heard his minor 1963 hit version of ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ on radio Luxemburg, and in December of 1964 I saw Jerry Lee and Gene Vincent ‘live’ for the first time at the Golders Green Hippodrome.

From then on I was hooked on rock’n’roll and Jerry Lee Lewis in particular, and joined many fan clubs, receiving various fanzines. I even started one myself called ‘The Bop Cat’. Mods and Rockers were very much in evidence, and though I never got involved with fights, they tended to put on Mod acts with old Rockers at ‘live’ shows, for instance my first ‘live’ gig was Manfred Mann supporting the headliner Bill Haley and His Comets. We booed this Mod acts mercilessly, and threw things at them. All shows in the 1960s were virtual riots between Rockers and Mods.

Most gays don’t like rock’n’roll, I soon discovered. I had put the Swiss boyfriend off by bringing round a tape of Jerry Lee Lewis ‘Live’ At the Star-club Hamburg which he said was ‘just a terrible noise’. I once took Kenny to a Jerry Lee recording of a TV show at Elstree, and wore my new blue drape Teddy-boy jacket made-to-measure by Burton’s the tailors a year earlier. He said he would never go with me again wearing that awful jacket which he felt showed him up, and he said Jerry Lee was arrogant and treated his fans with contempt.

My life with Kenny was OK at home, but we had no life outside. He preferred to go to even the local cinemas alone, or at least sit separate, in case he picked up someone, something I could never do in an ordinary cinema. He preferred to take a ‘girlfriend’ with him on trips back home to Ireland, so we very rarely went out together and never on a holiday.

Things trundled along, however, until New Year’s Eve when I happened to run into a bisexual acquaintance of mine in Trafalgar Square, and foolishly I invited him back for the night. I introduced him to Kenny, and before I knew what was happening they had hit it off together.

I was very immature and got terribly jealous, though it was entirely my fault for bringing him back in the first place and then letting him meet Kenny. We both used to see other people, but for some reason this episode really upset me and we had a terrible row. I played Jerry Lee’s Star-club Hamburg album, said to be the wildest ‘live’ recording of all time, at full volume at about 2 a.m. in the morning to vent my frustration, and Kenny knocked on my door begging me to show some consideration for the old lady who lived underneath.

My mother got to hear about the row, though not all the details, and evidently decided it was time she moved back to London to take me under her wing again. Of course it was a big mistake, and I allowed myself to be talked into it. She said she was all alone in the house in Welwyn Garden City now my brother and I had left, and if she exchanged it for a council flat in Camden I could move back in with her. I did try to explain I had a different lifestyle now, and would want to bring ‘friends’ (i.e. ‘trade’ or boyfriends) back sometimes, but she seemed ready to agree to any conditions.

So she got a flat in Camden Town and I moved in. Kenny was disappointed, but I still kept in touch with him and stayed overnight at his place occasionally. During the next year, 1969, I went in hospital to have a long postponed operation on my upper lip. I had been born with a cleft palate and hare lip, and had many operations on it as a child, but in my teens I had put off this final operation as I just could not face any more hospitalization. Now I had been on the gay scene for 2 years, my appearance began to worry me more, so I went in and had it done. I still think they could have made a better job of it and that a very simple operation would make my upper lip quite symmetrical instead of lop-sided, but I shall not bother at this late stage in my life.

At this time I had a boyfriend, Billy, who visited me at my Mum’s flat occasionally – I remember we all watched the TV pictures of the first manned moon landing together. Billy rang to check how I was in hospital, and the nurse who relayed this message to me swore she had spoken with a woman on the phone, he had such a camp voice.
 

In the summer of 1970 I planned my second trip to the Soviet Union, this time in the company of two colleagues in the local Communist Party, and the YCL before that – Steve and his sister Janice. We had been on holiday together to Paris in 1969, slumming it in a cheap bug-infested hotel and eating baked beans out of cans. I managed to give them the slip one time and scored in a Paris version of the Biograph cinema. My most vivid memory is of an incident during a visit to the zoo, when Janice, who was a big girl, came soaking wet out of a primitive public toilet of the hole-in-the-floor variety, laughing and screaming at the top of her voice as English-speaking tourists looked on in horror: ‘I fell dahn the bleedin’ crap’ole!’ I found it almost unbelievable that Janice was an English schoolteacher with this kind of language.

After we had been discussing the planned Soviet trip in my mother’s flat, she suddenly decided to come with us, and my mother told me later that she was worried I might try to defect, so wanted to keep an eye on me. I had become so infatuated with Communism this must have been a real concern to her. I even insisted on putting up a Communist election poster in our window, although my mother had in the past voted Conservative like her mother, and would never dream of voting left of Labour. No doubt she was quite horrified at what the neighbors would think, but I had tasted independence and was no longer the same person as the timid one who had left home over a year before.

In the summer we all flew off to Leningrad from Heathrow by Aeroflot, the Soviet airline (my mother thought we were making up the name, she had misheard us discussing a flight by ‘Aeroflop’!) It was the Communist Party of Great Britain’s ‘Lenin Centenary’ friendship trip to the USSR, and we got VIP treatment. Caviar, champagne and delicious chocolates were served to us on the flight. During the holiday an outbreak of cholera around Volgograd meant a cruise down the Volga to that city had to be canceled, much to our disappointment. My mother felt especially let down, since the boat trip was what she was most looking forward to. Our little Stalinist group was disappointed not to be visiting the city which proudly bore our hero’s name of Stalingrad for years, and to see the gigantic Motherland statue wielding her sword above the Great Patriotic War battleground.

We were flown instead to two cities – Ulyanovsk (Lenin’s birthplace of Simbirsk now honored with his family name) on the banks of the upper Volga unaffected by the epidemic down South, and Kharkov in the Ukraine. On a coach trip out of Kharkov the driver stopped by some sunflower fields stretching to the distant horizon for a ‘comfort stop’ and one woman got left behind – in the middle of identical sunflower fields somewhere in the Ukraine. The coach went back to look for her, but it was hopeless. Fortunately she hitched a lift to the next stop on the coach trip, where we met up again.

On the last night of our holiday, in our Leningrad hotel, several of us got very drunk, not surprisingly since we were drinking neat whisky from a bottle being passed round the dance floor. My mother, who was watching, must have been horrified, especially seeing what I did when everybody joined in a traditional Russian dance.

Each person in turn had to stand in the middle of a circle of people, place a handkerchief on the ground, kneel on it with one knee and choose someone from the circle (a member of the opposite sex) to join them in the middle, and then kiss them on the lips. In my intoxicated state I insisted on grabbing the hand of an attractive, fair-haired boy and trying to pull him into the center of the ring with me. Later, after a heated argument in Russian with his girlfriend, the boy spent the night with me in my hotel room. Not much happened really, as we both passed out from too much alcohol. He left in the morning wearing a bright red sweater my mother had knitted for me, and a bottle of whisky I bought for him in the hard currency duty-free shop tucked under his arm. I had exchanged the sweater for his cheap Soviet-made shirt, which I insisted on wearing for ideological reasons even though it looked awful.

The neat whisky had a different effect on my friend Steve. He collapsed on the dance floor and had to be carried up to his room and put to bed. All the time he was singing: ‘Arise Joe Stalin from your slumbers…’, instead of the real words of ‘The Internationale’ which were, or course: ‘Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers…’. (It was more appropriate actually for, as George remarked later, Janice and Steve were both very big and by no stretch of the imagination could be described as ‘starvelings’.) As Stalin’s name was officially never mentioned in the USSR at the time, I am not sure what the Russians helping us to carry Steve to his room thought of this Stalinist version of the anthem, which I had invented and taught my comrades.

It was only a few weeks after we got home that I met George in the Biograph, and my whole life began to change. I have already described the first few months of our relationship till the end of 1970, but before moving on to subsequent years, I must include a chapter from George’s diaries on the three months or so he spent as a resident of his favorite city, Paris. This was back in the 1960s, long before he met me.

7. GEORGE IN PARIS

 George wrote out the following ‘Impressions of Paris’ from his notes of the several months he spent in the city in the early sixties. He had gone on holiday there, probably with a client, and decided to just stay on. He got himself a room near the Bastille, and lived there as a Parisian. During this time he learnt to speak French very well, though he later lost some of his confidence through not regularly using the language. He earned a living in Paris as he had in London and Glasgow, short periods of employment interspersed with times he was ‘on the game’.

Here are George’s memories from his notes, some of which he typed out just six months to the day before he fell terminally ill on the boat to Jersey in 1991. From the Prolog, it is obvious he intended these notes to one day form the basis of an autobiographical book about his relationship with his favorite city.

‘Impressions of Paris

 ‘So much has been said and written about Paris already. Nevertheless, I have always wanted to convey the emotions and experiences which envelop me each time I visit this favorite city, so I write these autobiographical notes purely on a personal level and for no other reason than a need for self-expression.

‘I would like to describe this book as a love story – the difference being that the object of the author’s affection is a city.

‘When I first came to Paris in 1964 I rented a room a stone’s throw from the Place de la Bastille. The old concierge would often invite me down to her basement room for coffee in order to practise her English.

‘Amidst huge potted plants and photographs, Madame Artaud would reminisce about her youth, when among other things, she attended the Paris Exhibition, witnessed the sensation and riot caused by the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring” and the scandalous sexuality of Nijinsky.

‘When she felt sad, she spoke of her only son, Emite, who had worked in the French Resistance. Holding back her emotions bravely, she would show me his photographs, and the last letter she received from him postmarked Marseilles 24 January 1943 in which he wrote of hoping to embark on a ship going to the United States, using false documents. She was convinced he never went to the New World, but was killed before escaping.

‘During more cheerful conversations, she would speak about her career as a cellist in the music hall. Sometimes in the evening the tenants would hear her play a phonograph – always the same, scratched 78 rpm records – the Cafe Mozart Waltz from “The Third Man”, a plaintive song called “La Maison du Reve” and Musetta’s waltz song from “La Boheme”. If ever I hear these tunes, the image of Madame Artaud floats into my mind, just as the music floated up the staircase of the house in the Rue du la Fayette.

‘During those days, I frequented a cafe in the Rue Navarone. The proprietress had henna hair, sharp screwed-up eyes, an even sharper nose, and thin tight lips which seemed not to belong to the flabby face. Her profile looked like a portrait by an amateur artist that had gone wrong. Madame S. was between 40 and 55, it was difficult to determine. Always, she was polite to the clientele, but distant, seldom smiling. So it was with surprise I entered her establishment one early afternoon to hear her singing.

‘The drudge who cleared the tables confided that Madame had become infatuated by a certain Africain – a refugee from  the Congo’ (formerly the Belgian Congo, later Zaire and the Democratic Republic of Congo) ‘who frequented the cafe with one or two fellow exiles. It soon became common knowledge among the regular customers that an affair had developed between Madame S. and the Congolese man. One evening a hooker who worked on the Rue Pigalle flirted with the Africain, at which Madame S. flew into a rage and threw her out. We could hear the sounds of her lover soothing the proprietress behind the flimsy curtain which separated the counter from the kitchen.

‘About a month after this incident, as I ascended the steps of the Metro, the ancient vegetable-seller who dispensed local gossip with the cabbages and carrots, called me over to her stall and informed me that Madame S. had been taken to a hospital for the insane in an hysterical condition. Apparently her lover had been apprehended by the authorities and since it was discovered his passport was forged, deportation was inevitable. On discovering this, Madame S. pleaded with the police, offered a large bribe, and when this was refused, she became irrational, screaming and scratching the gendarmes and swearing obscenities.

‘The cafe closed, and two months later opened as a Tunisian restaurant. No one knew if Madame S. was still screaming or sane, not even the ancient vegetable-seller outside the Metro station.’
 

That is where George’s typewritten manuscript ends, but he also left some scribbled notes which seem to describe various visits and stays in Paris. Before the Bastille room, he seems to have lived on the Left Bank and then moved to Montmartre. This could have been a previous stay, since he writes of renting a room in Paris at the age of 18, which would have been about 1961 rather than the 1964 residence described above, when George would have been in his early 20s. From George’s notes, vivid impressions are built up of the people he met in Paris, and of events which he fondly remembered for the rest of his life.

‘The first friend I found in Paris was a classical guitarist from Santiago who, for political and artistic reasons, preferred Paris to Chile. He was 25 with no passport, so he was reduced to playing background music in night clubs owned by exiles who did not insist on work permits or papers of identification.

‘I quickly discovered that Manuel loved music and me, and for a few weeks we lived together and he found work for me. In the mornings we slept, in the afternoons we explored Paris, and at night he worked. Since I had no musical talents, my work consisted of cleaning cutlery, glasses and floors, which I soon tired of. Furthermore, Manuel’s sense of frustration became apparent, as did his anger at not having his interpretation of Bach, Vivaldi, Scarlatti and De Falla treated with the respect it deserved (for he was a professional player whose lack of papers prevented him finding legitimate work.)  The patrons of the club ceaselessly chattered and frequently drowned his sonatas, which drove him to loud gipsy rhythms whose sound contained his fury and frustration throughout the fandango.

‘Needless to say his Latin American temperament was difficult to live with, especially since he also became possessive and jealous about me, accusing me (quite wrongly) of a liaison with a handsome waiter. So after three weeks of Manuel I fled from the Left Bank and took up residence in a room in Montmartre.

‘An acquaintance introduced me to someone who specialized in lewd and crude photography and I shamelessly survived by selling my body and youth to the highest bidder. In no time I became a part of the demi-monde of Paris, where an assortment of acquaintances and experiences awaited me. Like Piaf, I regretted nothing, and learned much about life, love, authority, power, politics and the police.’

‘When I was 18 I stayed for some time in a rented room a stone’s throw from Sacre Coeur. In the adjacent room lived and worked a woman in her 30s. The creaking of the stairs (not to mention her bed and the bones of some of her clients) reverberated through the walls accompanied by those subdued but sexual sound effects which left me in no doubt that my neighbour was either a prostitute, a nymphomaniac or both. The clinking of coins and rustling of Franc notes which preceded the farewells led me to conclude the former, which the concierge soon confirmed.

‘I soon struck up an acquaintance with Marie, who, on hearing me praising Paris, said: “Mon Cher, I have been heard to say that I hate Paris and I hate men. The truth is, I cannot live without either. I have tried, but I need both like an addict needs a shot.” Although we subsequently spoke several times upon a diversity of subjects, it was the only occasion she betrayed real emotion.

‘To her clientele, she bared her breasts, but to me she bared her soul, and I have never forgotten her face, although admittedly I cannot remember her full name.’

‘Whenever I enter the Church of the Sacre Coeur, a certain image resurfaces from the vaults of my memories. I was playing local guide to two rich American matrons with limited French and unlimited finances. I sat patiently in a pew whilst they wandered around the aisles, their exaggerated exclamations echoing Heavenwards as they rushed around, clicking their cameras at every window of stained glass and statue, before descending on the souvenir shop.

‘Suddenly the sounds of stiletto heels clicking on the stone floor announced the arrival of a whore who I recognised from the Rue Lepic. She wore a tight fitting skirt, and she walked exactly as she did on the streets around Rue Lepic, as if the cheeks of her buttocks (derriere) were chewing caramels. Shamelessly, she bought a candle, which she lit and offered to God as she knelt in an attitude of prayer for several minutes. Then she departed as quickly as she had arrived, passing two shocked spinsters who were obviously horrified by her bold make-up and manner as her stiletto heels clicked back on to the streets to ply her trade.

‘I wondered to whom or for what she prayed. Perhaps she gave prayers to God for a good night’s business, or for protection from the police and pimps. Nevertheless, her image always confronts me whenever I enter the Sacre Coeur, more vividly than any plaster Madonna, and I cannot help wondering whether her prayers were answered, or thinking of her sister in sin – Mary Magdalene.’

‘Notre Dame

 ‘One evening I entered this church to escape from the five o’clock onslaught of workers and traffic. My head ached with the noise and bustle, and the black butterflies of depression flapped their wings against my brain. Suddenly the sound of choral music echoed Heavenwards, accompanied by an organ, and for the first time I heard Monteverdi’s Vespers, which the singers and musicians were rehearsing.

‘My headache and depression disappeared and only the music of Monteverdi mattered. It spoke of God, or worship, of peace, of love, and for an hour the material world ceased to exist. Since I am not especially fond of church or choral music in general, the effect was all the more magical and mystical. It is the kind of music one ought to die to, if ever euthanasia becomes fashionable, for it quenches all fears and pain and offers something spiritual to one’s soul. Surely this is what the deaf Beethoven heard in Heaven.’

‘A girl of my acquaintance who was studying English Literature at the Sorbonne, introduced me to a fellow student who, during university lectures, scribbled out the scenario for a television murder-detective film which he believed would be bought by the CBS network in the USA. His English was bad, but his American was even worse. For an agreed fee, I typed and corrected the grammar and spelling of his screenplay, whilst amusing myself over the inconsistencies of the plot, which contained more red herrings than a Russian trawler could catch from the Baltic Sea.

‘However, the Francs with which our aspiring TV scriptwriter paid me allowed me to buy a radio, which provided many hours of tuning into the BBC broadcasts and orchestral concerts. It made me feel less lonely when in my room, especially when heavy rain prevented me from walking the streets. (During this period I possessed no overcoat.)

‘Some time later I left my door unlatched one morning to go for milk and croissants. On my return my radio and clock had been stolen by a pimp who had spent the night with Arlette (Rose la Grosse). He also had made off with her wrist watch and her last evening’s earnings, which was not much for Rose was lazy. We ranted and raved about thieves and villains and Rose apologised, promising to get me another radio, which she never did. Her whole life was a series of good intentions and negative happenings, with sometimes positive results. I learned to always lock my door, even when going down to collect mail or visiting the bathroom, however briefly.’

‘One night I was taken by a companion to a basement cellar, or rather cavern, where Benzedrine could be bought. The habitués of the establishment struck me as more devious, dangerous and depraved than any I was accustomed to. There is even class distinction in the demi-monde. There are criminals and criminals.

‘My companion told me that the man at the table opposite us flanked by a Negro and a young man wearing false eyelashes and a false smile, was the writer Jean Genet. The name meant nothing to me then for I had not read nor heard of his books.

‘Later, after discovering “Notre Dame des Fleurs” and “Journal de Valuer”, I wished I could have talked to Jean Genet about his books. His prose is a curious combination of poetry and pornography. The continuity is elliptical. His philosophy and cult of crime fascinating. His characters are real. Much of his writing in prison is fantasied Pen = Phallus.

‘But, like Baudelure and Villon, he plucks flowers out of the filth, enriches and ennobles the poor with a poetic quality or image.’

George was to encounter Jean Genet again towards the end of both their lives. It was March 1986, and we were visiting Paris with our English friend, Rose. Looking for somewhere to eat in the Les Halles area, we ended up in a large but rather cheap and down-at-heel establishment, and there sitting at a table a few feet away from ours was Jean Genet , talking to another man. George kept staring at him, then he whispered to me: “That’s Jean Genet”.

George told me afterwards he was watching Jean Genet studying our friend Rose, who was then in his fifties and still had dyed blond hair, was of ample proportions, very camp, loud and extrovert. It may well be that Rose would have become the basis for a character in one of Genet’s books or plays, but sadly he died a few months after we saw him in the restaurant.

Again, George was denied the opportunity to go over and talk to Genet about his writings. Had Rose not been with us he may well have done so, but he did not wish to risk Rose becoming impatient and maybe making insulting remarks in his loud voice which Genet would overhear.

Continuing with George’s notes on his time in Paris:

‘One afternoon as I lay on the grass in the Luxembourg Gardens reading Hemingway’s “Moveable Feast”, I heard an American accent ask:

‘”Hi, good to see someone reading Hemingway. Are you American?”

‘“No,” I answered him, because at that time I was afflicted with an aversion to Americans, or rather the type of American one encountered in Europe.

‘“English, huh?” he deduced from my accent’ (Wrongly, for George was of course Scots.)

‘“Mind if I join you?” he asked, stretching on the grass beside me, and in no time we were both diagnosing Hemingway in general and “A Moveable Feast” in particular.

‘He was rather amiable, handsome, intelligent. We then discussed other writers, then theatre, modern art and films. I mentioned a desire to see a certain new film, and he suggested we go together. Embarrassed, I confided that I was financially impoverished, whereupon he told me not to worry about money.

‘“I’ll be glad of someone to talk to”, he said.

‘After the film, he invited me to a meal. I thanked him for his hospitality, but said I could not accept.

‘“Come on, I’ve got more money than I know what to do with.”

‘After the meal, and due to the carafes of wine, we both exchanged autobiographical details. It transpired that he had plenty of money but no accommodation, whilst I had accommodation but little money. As the room I rented had a sofa as well as a bed, I invited him back in return for his generosity. He accepted.

‘Later I learnt that he was an adventurer who supplemented his income by burglaries. Although I found him attractive, he spoke of a wife and child in Maine, and our relationship remained intellectual and never physical.

‘He stayed with me for a week, and then went missing for two days. He returned laden with money. He explained he had committed his biggest crime yet and was going back to the States before the police caught up with him. Before leaving me he gave me 50 Francs, which I tried to refuse, but he was insistent. We bade adieu.

‘He wrote to me from the USA, confessing our relationship had made him aware of his bisexuality. I never heard from him again. He was the kind of hero one plucks from the pages of a Tennessee Williams play. I wish we could have kept in touch.’

‘When times were tough I would live on baked beans, boiled eggs, bread and milk, which I purchased (or pilfered) from the local supermarket (this was pre closed-circuit TV systems) and took back to my room. On these occasions I compared myself with Henri Murger’s life-style as described in “Scenes de la Vie de Boheme”, but no-one need go hungry in Paris because it offers so many opportunities.’

George wrote a note here about making soup from vegetables and bones either scavenged, stolen or purchased from Les Halles market. He has scribbled the comment:

‘Since I had no work-permit, I lived precariously, no visible means of support.’

George’s most treasured possession was a Picasso reproduction which still hangs on my wall. It had been in every home he had lived in since he bought it in Paris, and he told me never to get rid of it. This is the story of how he bought it:

‘I could not resist browsing through the books and prints on the libraries of the Left Bank. On the first occasion I did so, I procured for a few Francs a reproduction of one of Picasso’s paintings from his blue period. It depicted two adults – one male, one female – and a boy by the sea.

‘It has become one of my most treasured possessions, and when I returned to England I had it framed. It has hung on walls in Islington, Bayswater, Victoria, Camden Town and Battersea.

‘During my nomadic existence when circumstances necessitated a change of abode, I would pack my belongings in one suitcase and the Picasso picture frame under my arm. It has become part of me and I cannot anticipate life without it being on the wall.’

‘I have already remarked that Paris is conducive to creation, but I was also to realise it can equally evoke self-destruction in others. In particular, I befriended a sad and suicidal young man, whose parents, religious upbringing and homosexuality contributed to a sense of guilt and despair which led him into taking large quantities of drugs and alcohol. I believed his only redemption lay in love, but since he himself believed that homosexual love was doomed/non-existent he continued on his course and one night he disappeared from our usual haunts. His belongings remained in his room and the concierge knew nothing of his whereabouts.

‘Later, I wrote a poem around him. Someone suggested I was a little in love with him, but he was already in love with death when we met, and he was too sensitive to face the fear and guilt which would fuse any future held out to him.’

The poem George apparently wrote on a much later visit to Paris is reproduced here:
 

‘Towards the Unknown Region

A slim, anaemic boy, who cannot face life’s pain

Whose eyes have seen Christ crucified in vain

The young man broods along the Rue du Madeleine

His thoughts transparent as cellophane.

 ***

Terrified of tomorrow, tired of today.

Once, long ago, he knew how to pray

But in his eighteenth year his faith flew away

On wings of guilt, because he was gay.

***

 Like a fugitive bird, the boy’s body takes flight,

Dark glasses imprison his sight

As he wanders alone through this city of night,

His sensitive soul stabbed by cruel neon light.

 ***

Montmartre adorned in the colours of a whore

Beckons the boy with its raucous roar

Mad music blares from each discotheque door

Unlike the silence in the Cafe d’Or.

 ***

It is here the youth comes to contemplate

Those erotic emotions which provoke love and hate:

For in his confusion he cannot relate

Or accept his condition, or laugh at his fate.

 ***

The Cafe d’Or provide pills to kill pain,

Which deaden the senses and numb the brain

So when he could face his future again

He drifted through darkness towards the Seine.

 ***

Next day, two boys who were rowing a boat

Found a pair of dark glasses on the river afloat.

(George M., May 1973, Paris).’

In one of his short notes, George sums up my own impressions of Paris. I first went there in 1969 with two friends. We had very little money and lived, like George, largely on tins of baked beans and French bread. I had always imagined Paris to be very chic, and was initially horrified by the squalor and the smells. Later, as George says of others, I learned to love Paris.

‘Like a lover, Paris either attracts or repels. You will either love or hate it at first sight, and those who are initially and promptly appalled by the poverty, decay, dirt and noise it presents, often learn later to love it despite these defects.

‘Travellers and tourists have a pre-conceived image of Paris as a metropolis where romance and beauty blossom, accompanied by accordionists, as they waltz through the boulevards towards the Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, Sacre Coeur and Notre Dame. They do not expect to see squalor and slums en route. Like all those who believe in a wonderland of illusions, they must inevitably be disappointed by reality.’

‘Those who read works like “Les Miserables”, “Senage Paris”, “Nania”, “L’Oeuvre”, “Le Chemin de la Liberte” after knowing Paris will live through the pages more poignantly.’
 

Some of George’s notes are very incomplete, and we can only guess at the stories that lay behind them: ‘L’Opera. “Traviata”. “Boheme”. Found Henri Murger’s “Scenes de la Vie du Boheme”‘. ‘Sodomised in a cemetery.’ He also wrote brief impressions and observations of his favorite city:

‘The mushrooming of sex shops in Montmartre, replacing the old cafes, patisseries and epicier. Why anyone wishes to purchase inflatable dolls and vagina cushions, when the real thing (flesh) can be obtained from the girls who line the length of Rue Pigalle any night waiting to sell their wares, seems senseless to me. The sex shop deals in existential auto-eroticism and sexploitation.’

‘Paris retains one of its basic functions – an ability to shock.’

‘Its atmosphere, its ambience is unique.’

‘It is especially attractive to lovers, by which I do not refer exclusively to those whose love is sexual and physical, but also lovers of literature, art, history, poetry, music, architecture and gastronomy, and above all those who love life.’

‘Perhaps the sense of de ja vu which I have always felt in Paris contributes to my adoration of the city, and, like a lover, makes me biased about its imperfections.’

George was convinced he knew Paris in a previous life, which would explain why the French language came so naturally and easily to him. On his first visit to Paris, he said he knew what was round the next corner in the Montmartre area before he reached it, and not famous places depicted in paintings. (Such places always look different from how you imagine them when you actually see them anyway.) He always said that on his first visit to Paris he knew his way around as if it was his hometown.

‘Paris is pervaded with ghosts from its past. It evokes those personalities with whom one inevitably associates the city. Once upon a time, in these streets and houses, penniless poets, exiled writers and anonymous artists struggled for recognition. Balzac, Hugo, de Maupassant, Zola, Verlaine, Villon, Rimbaud, Lautrec, the Impressionists found inspiration to create their masterpieces.

‘Exiles from Russia, Europe, the USA and England sought sanctuary in Paris. Chopin and George Sand, Stravinsky, Diagalev and Nijinsky, Oscar Wilde created scandals here. Henry Miller, Hemingway, Henri Murger, Saitre and de Savoir, Picasso, Renoir, Bunuel, Lautrec, Proust, Collette, Gide, Piaf, Cocteau, Genet, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. One has only to visit Pere Lachaise cemetery to realise how many famous people made this their final resting place: Isadora, Wilde, Piaf, Visconti, Proust, Chopin and many more.

‘Existentialism, Impressionism, Surrealism were born here. It was the scene for all sorts of scandals – strange couples like Chopin and George Sand, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Solse and de Banoir. Henry Miller’s prose, considered too pornographic for publication in USA/UK, was published here. Oscar Wilde escaped the wrath of UK here and died. Cocteau smoked opium, Jean Genet transferred crime into a cult. Stravinsky gave us “Rites of Spring”. Proust, Cocteau, Genet, Collette could write about homosexuality without being excommunicated or imprisoned. As Diagalev and Nijinsky found, Paris is conducive to creation.’

‘One feels that after six months in Paris one must create either a masterpiece or a scandal.’

After George and I met, we frequently visited Paris, and I too learned to love the city. George wrote about one time when he took me to visit Pere Lachaise cemetery:

‘Sunday 15th April. We took the Metro to Pere Lachaise, which must be the most famous graveyard in the world. Certainly it does not have any of the conventional characteristics associated with cemeteries – the trimmings of doom, decay, depression and neglect are absent here. It has streets and sections, like a miniature Pompeii of the dead. Family tombs and monuments stand like small houses or shops as we pass by – each one having its own characteristic as to construction, dedication and design. It was much larger and less depressing than I had anticipated.

‘At the entrance the genial gate-keepers were on hand, and obligingly offered information and a photocopy of a plan of the cemetery (gratis, but of course the plan was well worth the expected tip, as one would spend the whole day seeking out one or two of the famous who found peace here.) The whole place is so picturesque, do not be surprised to see tourists taking pictures.

‘Our original plan was to visit the grave of Edith Piaf, whose life, loves and deaths (for she died so many deaths during the course of her life) I had written into a poem. Whilst writing it I automatically assumed she would be buried in Pere Lachaise solely because it rhymed with the previous line of my poem. To my relief and amazement I later discovered that this was the truth. Hence the desire to see her last resting place.
  

‘It is a beautiful grave, small and simple. (Others are skyscrapers in comparison). Buried with her are her father, Louis Gassion, and Theo, her last love. A photograph of them on the gravestone reminds us of their beautiful, brief and tragic idyll together. A border of living, growing, flowering plants surrounds the stone. There were no cut flowers withering there, except Theo, who was cut in the full bloom of his youth. I shed a silent tear, but before I could be overcome with the sadness which her legend always fills me with, the whole scene was invaded by a group of grave-hungry vampires, disguised as tourists, who jostled and shouted excitedly, as they clicked their cameras, capturing the celebrated dead who, fortunately for them had the good sense and forethought to be buried with such close proximity to each other.

‘Among those others whose last remains lie here are Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Musset and Wilde (for whom Epstein sculptured an Egyptian Sphinx-like tomb at the bequest of a lady who wished to remain anonymous, for in those days it was not yet fashionable to admire anyone who was gay.)

‘Isadora Duncan’s ashes lie in the crematorium, which stands in the centre of Pere Lachaise, but there were so many little boxes it would have taken all day to find hers. The latest acquisition must be Visconti (Director), but by then our poor feet were tired of trudging the cobblestones. One section has a distinct left-wing slant, containing the graves of…..’.

Here the page ends and the rest of George’s notes about Pere Lachaise are lost.  I recall there were some very impressive sculptured graves in this section dedicated to various French Communist Party members and other leftwing personalities.

On either this or a subsequent visit to Pere Lachaise, we were at the entrance studying our map with its streets of the dead and the posthumous ‘addresses’ of the famous departed, when a little old woman came up to us and excitedly gesticulated as she gabbled away in French. George translated for me that she wanted to show us their latest inhabitant, the French actress Simone Signoret. This unofficial guide rushed us through the streets of this necropolis, and proudly pointed out the residence of the latest famous citizen. She later led us to other famous people’s graves. I am sure we tipped her for her trouble, but she was just proud of her local cemetery and as eager as the resident of any city to point out to visitors the ‘homes’ of her famous neighbors.

I will finish this section of George’s time in Paris with a retrospective note he wrote after visiting one of the areas he once lived in Paris:

‘Sunday, April 1981. This afternoon I took the Metro to the Place de la Bastille, from here I re-traced my footsteps to the rue where I used to live. During my first visit to Paris in 1963, I fell in love with the city so much that, rather than return to London as planned, I decided to stay and so found accommodation in a tiny room at the top of a narrow staircase, which overlooked the Place de la Bastille, with its tiny bandstand. Memories and nostalgia. I then decided to write down my impressions and the reflections provoked by Paris.’

8. BRADFIELD COURT

As we went into 1971, which was to be our first full year together, my grandmother lay ill in hospital after the fall which broke her hip just after Christmas 1970. My mother spent the first four months of the year in Welwyn Garden City looking after my grandparents, and during that time George left John’s room in Pimlico and moved into Bradfield Court. He brought Joey, his budgie, and his favorite Picasso ‘blue period’ print which he always said was quite valuable, a bargain he had bought in Paris when he lived there for several months and which I still have, he told me never to get rid of it

My mother had suggested George moving in, saying it would be company for me while she was away. Like most suggestions she made, it was something she had obviously not thought out properly. So instead of being my friend or a lodger, George became my ‘brother’ as far as the neighbors were concerned, in case my mother should cause gossip and possibly lose her council tenancy by taking in her son’s boyfriend. However, for the first year or so the honeymoon period between George and my mother lasted, and they were on quite good terms.

Around my birthday in March we bought and exchanged rings. We wore them till he died.  

There were no civil partnerships in those days, but had he lived I know we would have registered our partnership if only to put things on a legal footing so we had visiting rights if one of us ended up in hospital, etc.. So I now wear the ring he gave me on my wedding finger, and the ring I gave him on the same finger on my right hand. We were together for 21 years till he died, therefore as far as I’m concerned we were ‘married’ and had a civil partnership. For the same reason, I always list my status as ‘widowed’ on official forms, etc., never as ‘single’ as this would be a denial that our relationship ever existed.

George had lost his mother as a child, but this first year we were together he ‘adopted’ my mother and gave her a card and a little present on Mother’s Day. My mother must have really felt she had lost a son and gained another one. In fact she once said as much, saying she felt George was the son she had once aborted before marrying my father. George didn’t know quite whether to take this as a compliment or an insult, and in later years tended towards the latter theory. Being thought of as ‘the abortion’ wasn’t particularly flattering.

Sadly, in the early hours of my birthday, March 20th, my grandmother died in hospital. It is strange how dates play a significant part in my life. My best school friend, Michael, had also died in hospital on my birthday.

About a month after my grandmother’s death, my grandfather died, saying to my mother the night before: ‘I think I’ll go and find Edie’.

Soon afterwards, when all their affairs were sorted out, my mother came back to Bradfield Court and we all lived together. This was illegal because a third person was now present on the premises where two gay men were sleeping together. Such was the ridiculous definition of ‘privacy’ for gay men in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. The fact that my mother had a separate bedroom counted for nothing, we could in theory have been raided and arrested.

In early April George left the British Film Institute. I seem to remember he had to leave because of staff changes in his department, but he soon found another job working in Moss Bros, the high-class dress hire firm in Covent Garden. He started there at the end of May.

In May George took me to Hastings for the first time to meet his old friend, Rose and his partner Neil. My mother came with us, staying elsewhere in the town.

Rose and Neil’s flat was an antique dealer’s paradise. Neil had lived in the rented maisonnette, on the upper two floors of an old Victorian house near the railway station, for many years. During that time, and even earlier, he had accumulated a treasure trove of valuable antiques and mementoes of years gone by. He little seemed to realize the value of half the things, which were just every day objects to him.

Their flat was always a muddle, but almost everything you picked up was a relic from a bygone age. It was almost like stepping back in time. There were pre-War comics in mint condition full of what would now be regarded as very non-p.c. storylines and pictures, a mint copy of the program for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and pre-War family photos lay in drawers still in their original envelopes, complete with negatives.

In the 1990s when looking for some paper to write on Neil handed me an envelope with a George VI stamp, and on another occasion a school exercise book, last entry in 1938. These things had just been lying around for decades.

Two whole rooms were crammed full of ‘junk’, much of which was valuable. A lot of the furniture was antique, and when they offered you a hot water bottle it was the old ‘stone’ type. They had two matching earthenware washbasins and jugs sitting on top of a marble-topped unit, and numerous other objects from another era which sat incongruously alongside modern appliances like the TV and fridge.

The main living room was dominated by a huge painting covering most of one wall, in a heavy frame and illuminated by a special light. It depicted hunting dogs alongside their dead game. It had been painted by Neil’s uncle who was a famous animal painter and sculptor named Daws.

The sad thing was that many of the paintings were neglected and deteriorating. A circus scene in tapestry format ran all around Rose’s bedroom, but the unframed canvas was just held to the wall with drawing pins. A hunting tapestry suffered a similar fate, and sections of both tapestries were to disappear over the years, perhaps hidden away in a box or possibly lost forever. There were quite a few other unframed canvases lying around, as well as several framed ones. There were also animal sculptures (one of a dog used as a door-stop), and a sketch of a famous coastal view from Hastings’ East Cliff looking towards the Firehills and Fairlight Glen.

Neil was very conservative in character. At the time we visited in 1971 he worked for the Ministry of Defence. He didn’t like me wearing my CND badge in his presence, saying he could lose his job if seen with someone wearing that badge! Rose then worked as a porter in an hotel. He was as camp, outrageous and extrovert as ever. They were as different as chalk and cheese, a complete contrast of personalities.

Even though my mother was with us back in 1971 on our visit to Rye Rose insisted on going into every cottage (toilet) en route round town. Their dog, Cindy, obviously knew this route well because she was running ahead on her lead and turned into each cottage without any prompting. My mother remarked that Rose must have a weak bladder.

That year we acquired two kittens. We bought Dixie on or around my birthday in March. George and I went up to Club Row Market, Shoreditch and chose him from a cage full of little tabby kittens, all climbing over each other. Dixie made the trip with us down to Hastings once as a kitten. Some time later my aunt and uncle arrived at our flat unannounced with 4 or 5 of their six grown-up children, and a tabby and white kitten.

Dixie never took to this dramatic arrival of Dinky, and from then on adopted a strategy of trying to starve the intruder out. Dixie would regularly gobble down his own meal and most of Dinky’s before the slower eater had hardly begun. We had to feed them separately until Dinky learned to hold his own. They gradually tolerated each other, and even got quite friendly, giving each other a wash, but I don’t think Dixie ever quite got over what was to him Dinky’s unwelcome arrival.

At the end of August George took me up to Scotland to meet his family, and during our stay we visited one of his childhood seaside resorts, Ayr. It was a cold and windy day, but we had a paddle and visited Robbie Burns’ cottage. We went into a photo booth and had some romantic pictures taken of us holding hands and kissing.

He also showed me his favorite Scottish city, Edinburgh, where we climbed up the big hill known as Arthur’s Seat together. He took me on his favorite walk, along the stream down by Dean village. Of course we also saw Princes’ Street, the Royal Mile and the Castle.

Most of our time was spent in Glasgow. We stayed with his sister Betty and her husband and six children. It was bedlam. They lived in Easterhouse, a huge post-War housing development on the Eastern fringes of the city. His other sister, Margaret, lived in the Western suburb of Drumchapel, another post-War housing scheme. Margaret and her husband had five children.

We went on a one-day coach trip to The Trossachs while we were in Scotland. It was very picturesque, and we came home with some lovely photos. Loch Lomond, just northwest of Glasgow, was another beauty spot George first showed me on this visit.

As well as his sisters and their large families, I met several of his aunts, including his Aunt Rose, who looked after him when his father died, and Aunt Beeny, who had lost one or two fingers in an accident years before. George showed me all the sights of Glasgow, including the beautiful Kelvingrove Park near the Art Gallery and University, and Barrowland, a big market, where there was a mussel shop George loved. You could go in and order a plate of hot mussels.

In October a play came on TV starring Patricia Hayes as ‘Edna, The Inebriate Woman’. We both loved this study of a down-and-out bag-lady, played brilliantly by the veteran comedy actress. In later years George wrote a pilot sitcom TV script based on his own experiences and people he met when sleeping rough, and the central characters were two bag ladies.

George suggested Patricia Hayes for one of the two central characters, remembering her portrayal of Edna. His script was rejected by many TV companies, but some time later Patricia Hayes and Pat Coombes starred in a TV sitcom about two bag ladies, one of whom carried a Harrods shopping bag. This had been in George’s script, which we thought was much better that the ones produced by the TV company’s script-writers. So George’s idea, the two central characters, the Harrods bag and Patricia Hayes all made it successfully to the TV screen, but George got no credit for it.

During the first two years we were together George introduced me to Jean Frederick’s ‘Drag Balls’ at the Porchester Hall, near Queensway. These were theatrical events featuring some fabulous ‘drag.’ There would be a competition for the best costume, and plenty of music and dancing.

I remember the first time I saw George in drag – I was stunned. He looked so beautiful. He had small features, and in drag with make-up and a wig, he looked like a real woman. He had gone to his friend Roy’s place in Notting Hill to drag up, and when I went there to meet him to go to the ball, I did not know what to expect. He looked very nervous as I walked into the room, but was visibly relieved when I was so astounded and pleased with his appearance. I think I fell in love with him all over again – the nearest I have experienced to falling in love with a woman. Through the disguise I could see his eyes full of the familiar tenderness and love he showed towards me – they were truly the windows to his soul. He verbally reassured me that this female incarnation was in fact still him, my George, but I did not really need this confirmation. I would have known and loved him/her in any guise.
 

George kept his drag hidden away in the wardrobe in our bedroom. It was to lead to an end to the honeymoon period between George and my mother. She discovered the drag one day, and George never saw her in quite the same light again. If her snooping caused her distress she had brought it on herself.

At the time an old friend of George’s, Marlene, used to come with me to my rock’n’roll club most weeks. As she lived in Southeast London she used to stay the night at our flat sleeping on the couch, and go home the next morning. My mum got upset about this too, and kept on about what the neighbors would think. It was quite ironic, since she had made such a big point about George being my ‘brother’ rather than my boyfriend, having a girl to stay overnight should have allayed any suspicions as to the true nature of our relationship.

Logically my mother should have made sure the neighbors saw Marlene leaving early in the morning to allay suspicions George was my boyfriend, but in my mum’s eyes her unmarried son having a girlfriend stay overnight in her council fact was little better than having my boyfriend living with us. It was a row over Marlene staying overnight that eventually caused us to leave Bradfield Court and find a flat of our own.

When my mother discovered George’s drag, he led her to believe it was Marlene’s clothes which she left there to change into after going rock’n’rolling with me. However, not realizing George had told her this yarn, I put my foot in it as usual by telling my mother the truth: that they were George’s clothes which he wore when going to the theatrical drag balls.  I do not think George ever forgave me for spilling the beans, as it confirmed my mother’s worst suspicions and strained the relationship between them.

At the end of 1971 we were, however, still living with my mother at Bradfield Court. That was the first Christmas we actually spent together.

The next year George left Moss Bros and came to work with me at Post Office Overseas Telegrams, as they were then called. We rarely saw each other as he was sent on different training courses, and ended up in a different building altogether.

Because we both worked shifts, we often came in very late from work. My mother could not handle this situation. If we were not due in till 9pm, she still insisted on cooking the meal at 5 or 6 pm and keeping it hot for us. Consequently it was all dried up by the time we came to eat it, and she complained about her meal being ruined and all the hassle. She just could not get into the habit of having hers and leaving us to cook ours when we came in, or all eating late.

We tried to lend a hand with the housework, and even worked out a rota so Mum would not be left with all the work. It was never successful, for if we were doing the washing up or vacuum cleaning, Mum would interfere and criticize, and ended up taking over and doing it herself. Finally, there was the big row over Marlene staying the night regularly. My mother made it quite clear it was her flat, that she was worried about what the neighbors would think, and that she did not want to risk losing her council tenancy. I shouted up the stairs after her that if she felt like that George and I would move out to a place of our own, and eventually, that is what we did.

Another big upset was when we were all going out for the day, and my mother, for some unknown reason, decided to take George’s pet budgie, Joey, down from his hook on the ceiling and put him on the floor of the airing cupboard with the door ajar. She said she was worried about him catching a chill as it was a cold day, and she thought there was a draft from the door to the balcony near his cage.

Our cats were always looking longingly at Joey’s cage, and Dixie in particular was determined to get him. On several occasions we had found him clinging to the cage from the ceiling, having jumped up there from some piece of furniture. When we came home from the day out, poor little Joey was dead in the bottom of the cage. Although he had no claw marks on him, obviously the cat had gotten to the cage and tormented him, scaring the poor little thing to death. My mother swore she thought she had left the cats locked up in another room, but George was heartbroken and never forgave her for this. He believed she did it deliberately as she did not like budgerigars very much.

Whether there was any truth in this, or she was just a bit forgetful, it was a terrible blow to George, who had already lost his beloved cat when his former flatmate, John, shoved him out on the streets to fend for himself. George also had the terrible memory of his stepbrother cruelly squeezing the life out of George’s pet hamster. Now my mother, through her carelessness, had killed the only remaining pet belonging to George before he knew me. It was not to be the last pet of ours whose death she caused. She claimed only to have acted out of the best of intentions, to keep Joey warm and snug on a cold day, but the end result was tragic and did not improve the relationship between George and my mother.

In late February 1972, George’s sister Betty came down to London for the first time, and stayed with us for about a week. Her teenage neighbor, Catherine, came with her, and also Betty’s youngest child, James, who was then a baby in a push-chair. Catherine longed for children of her own and doted on ‘wee James’. We took them around the sights of London, and established a monotonous routine which continued for nearly 20 years. We would ask Betty what she would like to see, and the reply was always the same, an apathetic:

‘I’m nae bothered. It’s all one.’

I remember on that first occasion coming off the bus or Tube at Westminster and George pointing out the tower of Big Ben, but Betty was much too preoccupied with wee James to even cast a glance at the famous clock tower and Palace of Westminster. On this and subsequent visits over the next two decades, Betty would regularly come down to London with a succession of ‘wee weans’ (pronounced ‘wains’) as she called them (‘screaming brats’ in our parlance). When her own children grew up she brought her grandchildren (grandweans) instead.

Betty was not really interested in seeing any of the sights, or at least she gave that impression, but insisted on dragging an endless stream of brats round St Paul’s, the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace and the rest even though most of them were too young to appreciate it. The truth be known, Betty was only interested in going round the shops for tacky little souvenirs for the folks back home, and the ‘weans’ were only interested in chips, crisps, sweets, ‘ginger’ (Glasgow slang for all soft fizzy drinks) or anything else they could cram into their greedy little mouths to rot their teeth, clog their arteries and set them on the road to heart disease.  All food was rejected unless it was fried in a pan full of grease and accompanied by equally greasy chips. A roast joint of meat with potatoes, vegetables and gravy was looked upon with horror by the ‘weans’ as some nasty foreign meal they would only eat under sufferance, picking at it for about an hour so you knew how much you were torturing them by depriving them of their usual Glasgow sausage (i.e. hamburger) and chips.

Back in those days British Rail used to run very cheap day excursions all over the country, and we went on many of these, usually with my mother. We went as far afield as Edinburgh, Llandudno, Aberystwyth, Blackpool, Torquay, York, Chester, Carlisle for the Lake District and, that Easter in 1972, to Weymouth. It was a great way to visit places in Britain.

In September of 1972 the three of us had our first holiday together, staying in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. We toured the island, and on one occasion were late for dinner because we tried to climb up some cliffs from the beach. George and my mother started panicking half way up, since they were steeper than they looked.

It was on this holiday I met up with the mother and father of Michael, the schoolfriend who had been killed crossing the road. We had called round at their North London address one day and been told they had moved to the Isle of Wight. It was easy to trace the Czech name beginning with a Z in the Isle of Wight phone book. I had not seen Michael’s parents since he died, 12 years previously, so we wrote and arranged to visit them whilst we were on holiday. We then kept in touch for several years, visiting each other, writing and phoning, till Michael’s father died and I lost touch with his mother, who was talking of marrying again. I think she probably found the memories I invoked too painful, for that was the reason they moved to the Island in the first place, to get away from people and places associated with their long lost only son.

Round about this time, late 1972, we started making a regular date of Sunday lunchtimes at ‘The Black Cap’ pub in Camden Town. A drag artist named Marc Fleming, or ‘Auntie Flo’, used to appear there, and sometimes he was joined by Mrs Shufflewick, another female impersonator who had been quite famous on the radio. Marc was not everyone’s cup of tea, but we loved him. He was in his fifties and amply built, and used to play to a packed bar every week. He had an acid tongue, but it was all part of his act. His fans came along just to be insulted.

Coachloads of foreign tourists would be brought to the pub, and Marc used to joke that the couriers charged them a fee to see ‘an old English poofter on stage.’ It was probably true.

The things Marc said on stage were often unrepeatable, which is probably why he never got a wider TV audience and became famous like Lily Savage. He could never have done his act on TV in those days. As it was he often got kicked out of pantomime for going too far, or swearing on stage in front of the kids. He not only insulted his audience, but politicians and the Royal Family, at a time when the latter were very rarely criticized or lampooned. If anyone was foolish enough to heckle Marc, they got more than they bargained for. A woman heckling him was like a red rag to a bull. Quick as a flash came the retort:

‘Shut up you fucking, bucket-mouthed, hairy-arsed lesbian. When I say “shit” jump on the shovel.’

Hardly a politically correct jibe nowadays, and even then some people felt very uncomfortable. Marc always managed to be topical, and one week Golda Meir, then prime minister of Israel, had been visiting West Germany and was featured on TV news with Chancellor Willy Brandt. Marc’s quip about her going to Germany to pay the gas bill shocked many in the audience, who may not have appreciated the deeply satirical nature of this remark. Marc was himself Jewish, and the joke probably reflected his disapproval of Israel becoming so friendly with Germany. 

The Royal Family came in for regular mockery: ‘Princess Anne – the horse dressed up as a woman’, ‘Prince Charles – the next Queen of England’, the Queen Mother  ‘clad in black motorcycle leathers and a crash helmet with a bunch of wax cherries attached doing a ton up the High Street on her motorbike, smashing all the red traffic lights with a hammer’ as she went, ‘a terror for a woman of 76′ were typical Marc Fleming caricatures. Everything ‘Spitting Image’ later did, Marc had pioneered years before.

We took Rose’s partner Neil to see Marc one week, and he was not at all amused at the lampooning of the Queen and her family, which was just beyond pale as far as he was concerned.

His partner, Rose, loved Marc, despite being sent up. Rose is a very big man, of similar proportions to the late Marc Fleming himself, and on one particular occasion was wearing a scarlet jumper, check trousers and his usual spectacles. We deliberately took him up the side alley, through the Gents’ toilet so we would emerge near the front of the stage. We pushed him forward, and of course as soon as Marc Fleming spotted our friend he stopped dead in his tracks, pointed to Rose and said ‘I see Billy Bunter’s arrived.’          

Typical quips of Marc included: ‘That’s a nice dress, love. Did you get tired of the curtains?’ ‘Do they still do hairstyles like that in Peckham? It doesn’t suit you, dear – you should have it combed forward over your face.’ ‘There’s two men with beards down there. I like beards, but they bring my arse out in a rash. Why don’t you get together, do a 69 and get lockjaw?’ ‘That frock suits you. I do so admire a woman who can wear black. Been dead long?’ ‘Is that your wife next to you or just the weekend joint?’ The punchline for anyone who looked hurt or embarrassed was: ‘I’m only joking dear, same as God was with your mother’.

The Almighty regularly came under mild attack: ‘Isn’t she camp, that God, sitting up there on a cloud all day….’ There was a dog on the premises owned by the manager or one of the staff, and it too became a butt of Marc’s jokes: ‘It’s all wrong you know, that big butch dog sitting out in the alley tethered up with a string of pearls.’

You either loved Marc, or you hated him. His double act with Mrs Shufflewick was also popular, though Shuff liked her drink and often forgot her lines. Marc would then say: ‘That’s another gag you’ve fucked up for me.’ But he was really very protective of Shuff, and off-stage was a very nice person. He had a boyfriend, Joe, who was very quiet and shy, but who was sometimes persuaded to sing a few numbers. He specialized in Al Jolson songs (without the black make-up), and he had a wonderful voice very like Al’s. They were not dissimilar in looks also (Joe, like Al, was white).

Marc and Joe were often invited back to lunch or dinner by members of the audience, who knew they would be sent up the following week. ‘I went back with that queen in the corner last week,’ Marc would say, pointing out some squirming figure trying to hide behind someone else. ‘“Come for Sunday lunch”, she said to me last week. Sunday lunch? A tin of fucking Spam, dear.’

We loved our Sundays at ‘the Cap’. We sometimes saw my gay cousin in there as he was also a great fan, and once his two straight sisters were with him enjoying the show. Then one day we read in the gay press that Marc had died, I believe of cancer. It was a terrible shock and a very sad day for us, and all Marc’s fans.

Earlier in 1972 there had been a big UK tour by my favorite singer, Jerry Lee Lewis. I followed the tour around the country as far afield as Coventry and Liverpool, and dragged George and my mother along to the early show at the London Palladium, then left them to go home whilst I went into the second house. George was not overly impressed, but did say he thought it appropriate that Jerry ended his act that night with ‘Old Rugged Cross’, as it was a Sunday and Jerry calls himself a Christian.
 

The year 1972 ended with a trip up to Scotland with George for my first Hogmanay on New Year’s Eve. Nothing much happened up there until midnight, and I was wondering when the party would start. However, once the bells rang in the New Year it was a non-stop party for several days, with neighbors coming in and out all the time.

Catherine, the young neighbor who had come down to London earlier in the year with Betty, had a grandmother who kept getting up and coming in to join the party every time they put her to bed. Eventually I passed out from drinking Scotch, which I was not used to. Next morning I was awoken by two neighbors (male) trying to pull me out of bed to take me down the pub to start all over again. George saw them off and would not let them drag me down there, knowing what Glasgow pubs are like, especially at New Year. But the party started all over again that day, continued all night, and only fizzled out on about the third of January.

After Hogmanay in the Winter of 1972/1973 we headed back to London by coach. The weekend after Valentine’s Day was the ‘Aquarius Love Ball’ at Porchester Hall. We had bought six tickets for ourselves and friends, and George, Lena and Fifi went in drag as usual. All three of them posed for a photo outside a West End sex cinema on the way to or from the drag ball. They looked like three prostitutes with the film poster behind them reading: ‘Good Little Girls’ and ‘Sex Explosion’. A print of this photo is now in George’s collage.

Later that week we went to the National Film Theater to see Mae West in ‘Belle of the Nineties’. This was a film star George introduced me to whom I learned to love as much as he did. I think we saw all her films together (except her last, ‘Sextette’, which was not released in the UK during George’s lifetime), and we had some of her records, which we both loved. She had done cover versions of rock’n’roll standards like ‘Great Balls of Fire’, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘Happy Birthday Sweet 16′ which were quite brilliant and hilarious, full of double entendres, as were some of her much older recordings, such as ‘Sister Honky Tonk’.

Around my birthday in March, having completed his training as an Overseas Telegraph Operator, George started work at the International Telex Office in Fleet Building. This was very frustrating for him, since it was really nothing whatever to do with Overseas Telegrams, and all his training was wasted. No keyboard skills were required; he was expected to sit in front of a console pushing a button every now and again, a job which a robot could easily do.

It was, of course, a taste of the future when telex took over from telegrams, then fax from telex, and e-mail from fax. Telecommunications was a field which changed faster than most due to new technology. George hated the International Telex Office, and eventually left.

In April 1973 George and I took the first of many trips abroad together, a long weekend in George’s favorite city, Paris. We also included a visit to Versailles. I had not liked Paris on my first trip in 1969, but I saw it through different eyes with George. They say Paris is for lovers, and I certainly saw the romantic side of it as George proudly showed me the city where he used to live, including his favorite Montmartre area. We were to return many times to Paris together, and had booked for Christmas 1991, which of course was not to be as he died in the September that year.

9. TWO CRISES

Right at the end of 1972 we had what could be described as the first real crisis in our relationship, and it involved sex. Never being really sexually compatible we had been reduced to mutual masturbation. Everything else was for one reason or another just not physically possible it seemed, including anal and oral.  Remember George’s stepbrother was also unable to achieve penetration, and George lost his erection if anybody tried to give him oral. With his small mouth giving oral was not easy either, and he was never the active partner in anal sex as far as I am aware. We did a lot of cuddling though for all the 21 years we were together.

In the first few months we were together we were monogamous and faithful to each other. George had stopped taking amphetamines, which gave him most of his sex drive. However, he used to tell me about sexual experiences he had before he met me. This was a big mistake as I just could not handle it, and became incredibly envious of George. Our adolescent years had been so totally different. While I had been totally frustrated sexually, George had lived out and experienced almost every sexual fantasy any gay man could even imagine before he was 20 and I felt I had just missed out on so much.

I think it was inevitable that our relationship would have to become an open one to survive  given the very limited nature of our sexual activities together, my frustrated teenage years and George’s sexual preferences, which became apparent later.

We had certain rules – never to flaunt our sexual partners in front of each other, we only saw other people at certain times, usually weekends, and we tried to coincide. Most importantly, we never allowed ourselves to get emotionally involved with anyone else. If it started to get to that point, we stopped seeing that person. So we always remained emotionally faithful to each other right to the very end.  

The crisis started when I found and read a piece of paper in George’s wallet describing in intimate detail his sado-masochistic sexual fantasies. I had led a very sheltered life, and knew nothing about sado-masochism or slave/master relationships, yet this is what George was really into.

My prying into his private things left George just as shocked and horrified as I was by my discovery. My mother snooped and discovered his drag in the wardrobe, and now I had read some private notes in his wallet, but it could easily have been my mother, not me, who found and read about his secret fantasies.  Such things, if written down at all, are best done under a pseudonym and not left lying around.

I realized when I read George’s notes, that he must have assumed when he met me that I would play a much more masterful, dominant role than I ever felt able to. When we met I was dressed all in denim, which looks very butch. However, being basically a pacifist, I could never convincingly play the role of a master, and certainly not towards someone I loved so tenderly.

In George’s gay circle of camp gay men or ‘bitches’ they were always passive and looking for dominant, active men. I was versatile and assumed all gay men were likewise, I knew nothing of these ‘bitch’ and ‘butch’ roles, let alone ‘slaves’ and ‘masters’.

George got a bit impatient with my ignorance and naivety, but reading his S&M fantasies I then realized that he liked to play a very submissive role to an ultra butch man, the classic slave/master relationship of the S&M scene.

Finding it difficult to talk about such things even now, I wrote George a letter. It then became clear from his response that we both felt our relationship fulfilled our emotional needs, but that the sex left a lot lacking. He agreed that we were not very compatible sexually, and that this would most likely lead to frustration and sexual destruction. He was right, for sex could easily have destroyed our emotional relationship.

George said he was into fantasy rather than physical pain, and in truth I was similar, though at that stage had never acted out such fantasies. Apart from some mild, unconvincing ‘spanking’ which I indulged in to help him achieve orgasm on occasions (no doubt reliving the first experience with his stepbrother), we never explored S&M sex together. Indeed George  felt that only strangers were able to stimulate in this manner, and if I tried to play a more ‘butch’ masterful role I would just be going thru the motions, it would not be convincing.

It seems, from speaking to other S&M enthusiasts, that these ‘slave/master’ roles cannot be sustained within a loving, emotional relationship, which is probably why escorts (male and female) do such a good business fulfilling such fantasies.

I can honestly say we did the right thing in having an open relationship. Our emotional relationship survived for 21 years. Had we tried to restrict ourselves sexually to the deeply unsatisfying physical possibilities within our relationship, I believe we would have split up long ago. The strain would just have been too great, however much we loved each other. Indeed, this love could have easily turned to resentment that the other person was ‘cramping our style’ and the resulting frustration would have caused an explosion sooner or later. As it was the physical side of our relationship subsided (except for cuddling nightly), but the emotional one got stronger. Our love transcended and rose above the physical, and became spiritual, the union of two souls.

If two people are compatible sexually and emotionally, then a monogamous relationship is possible. If, however, they are sexually incompatible, yet one or both have high sex drives, the only way the emotional relationship can possibly survive is if they have some sort of open relationship whereby other people supply the physical needs. In other words, if you really love someone you want them to be happy and will not deny them something essential to their well-being.

With George and myself, the emotional relationship, a kiss and a cuddle, was all-important. But we both realized we each had sexual needs the other could not properly satisfy. Our spiritual love for each other lives on beyond the grave, and will continue for eternity. Sexual love is far more fleeting, often dying with youth. 

The second crisis in our relationship  occurred exactly three years later, December seemed to be a dangerous month. This crisis was about our separate interests; George in particular felt we had little in common. The resolution involved putting things down in writing, perhaps because we were both writers we found this easier.

George had said something about feeling more lonely living with me than when he was on his own. What had kicked off this crisis was when George had accused me of just going to our annual visit to a Dorothy Squires concert to patronize him. Actually I did like her older songs, but never did like the typical ‘diva’ style songs she and Shirley Bassey, etc. sung. Anyway some sort of row ensued about the concert, which escalated to George saying we had nothing in common any more.

It did seem by then we weren’t going out as much as we used to, and there was a weekend in Amsterdam when I let George go on his own because we’d been there some months before. This was the first time since we met we had not gone on holiday together.

Also, after weaning me away from the Communist Party, I’d drifted back and was now more heavily involved than ever, attending committee meetings as treasurer of my local branch in Battersea where we then lived. This must have meant George was left on his own many evenings.

In 1972 I’d left the Party and even started getting into religion, but completely the wrong kind. I started attending a little Assembly of God church, and was thinking of being baptized as a born-again Christian, mainly because I liked the music. My favorite singer, Jerry Lee Lewis and his family, belonged to that church, his cousin Jimmy Swaggart being a Pentecostal TV evangelist. The sect rejected me for being gay, and so by 1975 I had turned to atheism again and re-joined the Communist Party.

This must have also depressed him and made him feel we had little in common. I was planning a second trip to East Germany in 1976, which in the event proved to be a turning-point. It must have seemed to George at the end of 1975 that we were both locked into our own little worlds, with very little we could share.  What made it worse was when George was depressed he didn’t want to talk about these things, and so we drifted further apart.

It is partly the eternal irony of all relationships, it is the differences which attract us – they say opposites attract. So a typical husband enjoys his football, while the wife often cannot stand it. I didn’t like many things most gay men are supposed to like, but surely this is what attracted George to me in the first place. My love of 1950s rock’n’roll and the butch Teddy-boy/rocker image for example. Did he really want a queen who would enjoy Shirley Bassey concerts and admire her dress sense? Or perhaps he’d have been content with a Teddy boy who didn’t think the sun still shone out of the dead, disgraced arse of Joseph Stalin.

Classical music was another thing we couldn’t share, but I tried to point out some things we did have in common – films and artists we both liked, Mae West being one, and recent films like ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’.  Also the drag acts, like Mark Fleming, though I admitted I was tiring of the Porchester Hall Drag Balls now the novelty had worn off. However I loved the parties we had together, dancing to all sorts of records, and we both loved the old music-hall type songs.

Another area of tension was around our home, which George felt was deteriorating. We decided together to make a real effort to make it something we could both be proud of, buying little ornaments and things. I was never much good at DIY, but I did promise to fix the kitchen cabinet which was apparently broken.

We did build up some lovely homes, three of them in our 21 years together, though it was always George who took the initiative in buying things for the home. However, I did get quite good at ‘fixing’ little things, though neither of us were much good at DIY. Self-assembly furniture such as a wardrobe, video cabinet and shelves never were quite right – the doors didn’t shut properly and slide-out shelves refused to budge.

Although George would actually really choose the ornaments (since I had no taste, as he often told me), after this crisis we tried to go together and make sure we both liked what he suggested. My present home is one of the greatest legacies he left me, and I am still proud of it. Other people have remarked on what great taste George had. This is the reason I never want to move, or drastically alter anything in the flat.  

Writing was another thing we had in common, although we used different styles, and I suggested we should be sympathetic and help each other and perhaps even embark on joint projects. We did later co-write a series of scripts for a TV sit-com. Sadly, it was never accepted. Neither was one George wrote on his own, though his basic idea was stolen and used with an inferior script. (About two bag ladies, even his main prop, a Harrods carrier bag, and his suggested main actress was filched!)

When this crisis blew up I was running a 1950’s Rock’n’Roll and a Country music disco as a hobby, but I could not get the right dates and so it was not going very well. I suggested we do a gay disco together, as a joint venture. We did in fact do several discos together, though again it was hard to get the right bookings. We did a disco for a Porchester Hall Drag ball in February 1977. George was annoyed when a cameraman from ‘Titbits’ photographed myself dancing with Freda, and Rose with Lena, whilst poor George was stuck on stage playing records, so never got included in the magazine. The rest of us had our color photos across the center pages, which George years later cut out and included in his collage.

After this crisis we did start going out together more often I believe, and I promised to try and accompany him more often when we went to see his friends, as I had few of my own. George had accused me of not talking to people who visited us. I admitted I found some of them boring, though I enjoyed the company of others.

Being unemployed in the last year or so of his life, inevitably George visited friends on his own while I was at work, but I think I did make an effort to go with him when possible, and I also kept in touch with them after he died.

We realized how much we loved and needed each other, and that we had to work on the relationship. I had a budding interest in the paranormal, Spiritualism and the basic questions of life and death. This had been awoken in me by a book ‘Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain’ and similar articles in magazines. Atheist Soviet scientists had actually photographed the ‘soul’ or ‘astral body’ of living things, and it seemed to be able to survive damage to the physical body. The Soviets termed this astral body ‘bioplasma’.

I was constantly searching for the truth, and for a way to build a better world. Politics and the peace movement were one way, but a new Spiritual path was opening up to me as well as I gradually realized a purely materialist/humanist path was likely to lead to serious mistakes. Basically I had still to learn the lesson that people can be urged to treat each other better, but they cannot be forced, and that any political system can be distorted and used for selfish ends. No system is perfect. Uncle Joe Stalin’s brutal methods simply didn’t work in the long run, because absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Indeed I admitted during this crisis that idealists with good intentions had sometimes done more harm than good, and that I was not sure whether we should give up trying to change man’s nature. I said I was learning all the time, but that organized religion did not hold the answers for me. I prophetically wrote that maybe I would find the answers some day. 

I believe I did eventually find the right path, with George’s help, through Spiritualism and the idea of karma and reincarnation, with every soul making continuous progress by learning from life experiences over the centuries. Our politics also eventually coincided, both becoming pacifists and Socialists.

Things did greatly improve after this crisis, especially after I finally left the Communist Party for good the following year. But it was another crisis point which could have ended our relationship, and which proves you have to really work to make a relationship work, and not take it and your partner for granted, or get too involved in your own interests to the neglect of your partner.

10. INGELOW ROAD

The days of all three of us living together in Bradfield Court, Camden Town were coming to a close. George and I were soon to move into our first real home of our own together. In April 1973 we moved out of my mother’s council flat in Camden, to a ground floor flat in a Victorian terrace in Battersea. It was the only place we could find, and it belonged to an acquaintance of George’s friend, Roy. Eric the Jamaican landlord had no interest in letting the flat out but let us stay there as a favor to Roy.

Eric lived in a couple of rooms on the first floor, and the attic he let to a mysterious Irish character known as ‘The Gunslinger’ who did not live there, but called occasionally. George was very suspicious of this character, and thought there may well be IRA connexions. Eric and Roy were both leftwing politically.

I have fond attachments to our first home together, although it was hardly a palace. The electric wiring was so bad that when we moved out Eric could not let the flat again – a law had since been passed requiring a certificate that the wiring was up to standard before a flat could be let. We actually had a fire whilst we were there, caused by the faulty wiring.

Rose from Hastings was up for the weekend, and we were sitting in the front room with the light on when there were some sparks and the paper shade caught fire. Whilst Rose and I panicked and shouted hysterically inane things like ‘Get a bucket of water’ (to throw over a live electric light?), George remained cool and calmly but quickly stood on a chair and snipped away the string suspending the shade, and as it fell to the floor we quickly stamped out the fire. There remained a black patch on the ceiling which we did our best to scrub clean, but had it not been for George’s cool head it might well have been far worse. The ceiling could have caught fire, or Rose and I could have been electrocuted trying to throw water over a live electric light fitting.

We had no bathroom in our flat, or inside toilet. The loo in the yard had no light, so Roy fixed one up for us with a wire leading through the kitchen window to a power point. He did it so badly you got an electric shock every time you turned the loo light on. We had a rubber mat on the floor to absorb some of the shock when you performed this dangerous operation.

We bought a portable shower unit with a plastic container which you filled with hot water and pumped by hand. This stood in the narrow passage outside the kitchen. If we wanted a proper bath we had to go to my mother’s place in Camden.

Our two cats came with us to Battersea, and loved being able to go out into the yard at the back. We fixed up a cat-flap for them. Dixie, the greedy one, sometimes came in the kitchen window with little snacks he had nicked from someone’s breakfast table. One day he came in with a nice freshly cooked rasher of bacon. When we eventually moved, we could not find Dixie, and then I spotted him in a garden backing on to ours. I went round to the street behind and knocked on the door. It transpired they had been feeding Dixie for years, thinking he was a hungry stray. So he had been getting about 4-6 meals a day, taking into account that he ate most of Dinky’s meals as well.

One day Rose was visiting, and she loves her food to put it mildly. I had a Chinese take-away, which George did not like, but Rose had one with me. Then George got some fish and chips, so Rose had to get a portion too. Still hungry, he got chicken and chips, put it down on our coffee table to go and get some tomato ketchup, and Dixie seized his opportunity and grabbed the chicken leg off Rose’s plate. When she saw what was happening, Rose screamed and chased the cat all the way up the passage to the kitchen, grabbed the chicken leg from Dixie’s mouth, rinsed it under the tap and ate it. This was one of Dixie’s unlucky days, meeting someone greedier than he was.

 Another time he went missing for several days, and we had tearfully given him up for lost, or run over. Then he suddenly turned up in a dreadful state. He literally looked like the proverbial drowned rat, being soaking wet and covered in black mud and filth. We gave him a good warm bath and shampoo, and he survived to live to a ripe old age of 15. We never found out where he had been, but could only guess he had been trapped in a drain or somewhere similar for several days, then somehow managed to escape.

The woman next door, who we nicknamed Battersea Beattie, was always hanging out of her upstairs window watching what was going on. As we were going to the Porchester Hall drag balls quite regularly, and often dragging up at home, she must have seen some strange sights to gossip about. As we came in our front door she often waylaid us from her window to tell us she was off to try and win the ‘Battersea Banger’ (a jackpot prize at the local Bingo hall), or some piece of scandal. One day she informed us ‘old Atto’, the landlord, wanted to put her rent up.

She had lived there for years and was paying a very low rent for her upstairs flat, about £2 a week I believe. The only way the landlord could put the rent up, apparently, was if he made improvements to the flat, but Beattie was having none of it. Although Eric upstairs in our house had a bathroom, apparently Beattie did not, and Mr Atto wanted to install one for her, and then put her rent up.

‘‘E wants to put a barf in so ‘e can put me rent up, but I ain’t ‘aving none of it’, she informed us through the window. ‘I’m paying two quid a week for this flat and I ain’t paying no more’.

The implication of Beattie’s remark was that she had not had the luxury of a bath all her life, and did not intend to start now if it meant her rent going up.

Our flat was furnished by Eric, but we also gathered our own bits and pieces. My mother gave us some crockery, linen and curtains. Roy was a semi-professional at scrounging in skips and dustbins for items which he could sell. In the early hours around Notting Hill and Bayswater he could often be found with his head buried deep in a dustbin searching among the rubbish for anything useful. Once or twice he was nearly caught by the police in this position. He did find some amazing things, particularly on skips in the more well-to-do parts of West London. He gave us a lot of little things, and we used to joke that our flat was furnished out of skips.

Of course, we had to make do as best we could. Married couples setting up home just draw up a list of everything they need and it is provided by relations and wedding guests. Gay couples, before civil partnerships became possible, had  to fend for themselves as best they could, and setting up home for the first time is not easy, even in a furnished flat. There are hundreds of little items you take for granted which you have to acquire all at once.

After we moved out, my mother lived in various flats, eventually moved back to Welwyn Garden City and back to London in 2001 to be near me. Now in her 90s I call in daily to look after her and take her out.

On a British Rail Merrymaker excursion to Aberystwyth in May a lovely little steam train ride was included from the town up to Devil’s Bridge in the mountains where there was a marvelous view each side of the road overlooking a stream and a waterfall in a canyon. However, we had to pay twice to see this view as pay-to-enter turnstiles had been erected each side of the waterfall. The Welsh certainly know how to make money from tourists; in later years we visited the much more impressive Niagara Falls, but did not have to pay to see the view.

George  had started work as a telex operator at an Australian company. He stayed there ten years, and got me a job there eventually. After I left he went back there again, till made redundant when the firm went into virtual liquidation.

In July we went on our first long holiday abroad together, with George’s friend Roy, to Austria. We flew into Munich airport where a coach met us to take us to, as we thought, Salzburg. However, as the coach reached the German-Austrian border and stopped at passport control, I pointed out to George and Roy our hotel a few yards away up a hill. There was no mistaking the name of the Hotel Votterl which we had been allocated, and sure enough we were staying outside Salzburg in a picturesque little village split in two by the border. The Austrian side was Grossgmain, and the German side Bayerischgmain (Great Gmain and Bavarian Gmain). Every time you left the hotel you had to take your passports to show at the border post a few yards outside the door. Germans from Bayerischgmain regularly came across the border to watch TV in the hotel lounge, though I could never quite work out why.

We arrived in the evening, and were starving, having only had an airline meal. We were a bit disappointed to be served cold meat and salad, but would have made the best of it had it not been for Roy. He was furious because we were not staying in the city of Salzburg as the brochure had led us to believe, and this meal was the last straw. He kicked up a hell of a fuss, and to our delight, but also acute embarrassment, whilst everyone else in our group made do with cold meat and salad we three tucked into prime steak and vegetables at no extra cost. So it sometimes pays to make a fuss.

Actually we enjoyed staying in Grossgmain. The view from our hotel bedroom window of the mountains was out of this world, the village itself was very pleasant with its chalets and colorful window-boxes, and there were lovely walks to be taken in the clean air of these mountains. We did see Salzburg as the coach took us in several times, including a sightseeing tour.

Whilst in the Salzburg area we had some trips into Germany, including one to Berchtesgaden where Hitler had his retreat. George was a bit annoyed because Roy seemed to have something of an obsession about Hitler and Eva Braun, and was so excited to be there. In actual fact there was nothing much left to see of the old buildings, except what is known as the Eagle’s nest high on a peak in the distance. However the countryside around is beautiful. I remember sitting at an open air cafe overlooking a valley. Whilst in the Berchtesgaden area we visited the salt mines, and had our photo taken on a little train which runs through them. We also visited the beautiful Lake Koenigsee in Bavaria.

Back in the  immediate Salzburg area we had a trip by cable car to the top of the Untersberg, high above the clouds. The locals laugh when they see the sequence in ‘The Sound of Music’ where Julie Andrews runs down supposedly from the top of the mountain into Salzburg, because it is so steep, craggy and high you might just as well try to run down Everest. Our courier told us about a group of Americans he had taken on a ‘Sound of Music’ tour. He was telling them something about Mozart who had lived in the area, when one tourist complained:

‘We don’t want to hear about this Mozart guy. This is the “ Sound of Music” tour, and he wasn’t in the movie.’

After Grossgmain/Salzburg they dumped us in a boring small town called Ybbs on the Danube in the flat central area of Austria. All it seemed to have of interest was a mental hospital. To relieve the boredom the three of us used to skip through the town arm-in-arm singing a line I’d made up in my very limited German: ‘Wir kommen von das krankenhaus’ (we come from the hospital) and generally acting like loonies just to see the reaction of the locals, who never batted an eyelid. Evidently they were used to seeing escaped mental patients singing as they skipped through the town.

Ybbs was a dull, gray sort of place, with absolutely nothing to see or do. There was a folk festival one day, and there was the Danube, which was not blue and not particularly romantic as it flowed through the town. Of course the tour company’s idea was to strand us in a place so boring you would pay to go on the ‘optional’ tours to get away from it. We refused to do this, so just kicked our heels around town till it was time to move on to Vienna.

We were staying on the outskirts of the Austrian capital, and Roy began to get on George’s nerves with his perpetual moaning. We were walking around the city center one day and got a bit lost, and Roy moaned:

‘Oh no, we’re not back here again!’

George curtly told him to stop grumbling. After all, half the fun of exploring a new city is getting lost and finding your way around. One of Roy’s favorite sayings was ‘Your mother’s not stupid’, the maternal figure being a reference to himself. Actually ‘mother’ was extremely stupid on this holiday, going into a supermarket and paying about a pound (sterling) for a banana, which he then moaned about for days.
 

In Vienna we saw all the sights, including the Prater where we had a ride on the enormous Big Wheel made famous in the film ‘The Third Man’ with Orson Welles. We also went in a beer hall in the Prater, where they had waltzing waters and German-type beer songs. We had several such evenings throughout the tour which we enjoyed. One, in a village just outside Vienna, was a bit too touristy, with everyone being encouraged to link arms and act as if they were all drunk as soon as we arrived, but for the most part we remembered affectionately the Austrian and German songs we learnt, including one where everybody in turn had to get up and stand on their chair. Roy was about the only one who refused to join in the fun, and remained glued to his seat.

Before we left we had a farewell party, and our male courier, whom we nicknamed ‘Tinkerbell’ because he was always ringing a little bell to attract our attention, and his boyfriend (they were very obviously gay) waved us off, as did the hotel guests staying on. It was a very memorable holiday, though probably would have been even better without Roy, even if it meant going without our steak the first night.

At the end of September I paid my first visit to a prison, when we visited Lena in Pentonville (for some gay offense I believe). George planned a party for him when he came out. He was released on Friday October 5th, and we had the party next day.

This would have been the first of our parties, which we could now hold since we lived in a flat of our own. After going to the Porchester Hall drag balls we often had a party, and invited a few people back.

Our parties grew quite popular, though they were also quite a lot of hassle. George had to keep sober in order to make sure everything was under control. I am afraid in the early days I was not any help, as I used to mix my drinks and pass out. One drag queen of ample proportions we met at Porchester Hall once drove like a maniac all the way to our flat, so we called her ‘Gas-pedal Annie’. She took a shine to a young guy in a suit who had also been at the drag ball, but who was a bit naive. Making no headway with him, Gas-pedal Annie got him into our backyard and shoved a popper up his nose. Poppers are canisters of amyl nitrate, popular with gays. You sniff them and they give you a brief buzz, and they are something of an aphrodisiac. Of course the young man felt ill, and an argument ensued, which ended in Gas-pedal Annie throwing a drink over someone. George had to take the situation in hand as I was too far gone.

We met a much nicer character at the drag balls, Freddy or ‘Freda’ (also known sometimes as ‘Fifi of the Folles Bergere’). He was probably in his late 60s or early 70s when we first met him, but he made all his own drag, which was very theatrical and was covered in sequins, with headdresses of huge colored ostrich plumes and rhinestones. He appeared once in a charity show in Stockwell, on the same bill as Marc Fleming. Backstage, Marc was admiring Freda’s drag.

‘Who sewed all those sequins on your dress, love?’ asked Marc.

‘I sewed them all on myself,’ replied Freda proudly.

‘You must be fucking mental’, came back the Fleminesque retort.

Freda won nearly all the drag competitions at Porchester Hall. He used to come to our parties regularly and do a little cabaret. He also did the occasional cabaret for the old age pensioners’ club on the Waterloo council estate where he lived. He used to tell us how amazed they were that ‘The Fabulous Freda’ was none other than the scruffy little man in the flat cap who used to walk his dog around the estate.

Freddy had been in the Merchant Navy, and used to do some cabaret for the boys on board ship. He had also been in the theater, mainly as a dresser I believe. He had picked up and remembered odd lines from various plays he had either acted in or been associated with. He used to suddenly recite one or two of them, completely out of context and therefore they made little sense. Phrases like: ‘Your mother, she’s not in here’, ‘Have a piece of sponge cake’ and ‘She was a soldier’s wife, my dear, and the second thing he asked for was his breakfast.’ He also used old sayings remembered from his childhood, the meaning of which had been lost in the mists of time, such as ‘silly girl lemon’, ‘cheese or jam?’ and two of my favorites, which I like to pair together, ‘oily kippers – slap it on the wall’.

Freda remembered the people and events of 40 or 50 years ago as if it were yesterday, and was always asking us if we knew bitches like Bottle-Nosed Mary, Doodlebug Daisy, Carrier Bag Carrie (also known for some reason as Cannibal Kate), The Painted Lady, Chrissie Crow, Miss Minge (‘she used to say “I’m a Princess”‘), Kangaroo Kate and Pissy Morris (‘she used to pay old tramps to piss over her under Admiralty Arch, dear – init camp?’ Freda would say.)

‘Oh you must know Blow-Job Annie,’ Freda would insist, ‘She’s always around the West End, dear.’ Then she would think for a moment, and admit: ‘Of course, not now, I’m talking about them days,’ which probably meant in the 1920s or 1930s. Then Freda would continue with her saucy little anecdote of gay life in London back in those between-the-Wars years ‘Well, dear, she plated a black man on the top deck of a number 9 bus.’ What with camp queens being pissed over under Admiralty Arch and giving blow-jobs upstairs on London buses, the capital seems to have been quite an eye-opening place in those far off days.

‘Some bitches today don’t believe you when you talk about them days,’ complained Freda, ‘but it’s all true, my dear.’

Freddy/Freda also used to tell us stories of the places and things he had seen whilst in the Merchant Navy, though he sometimes got the places a little muddled. ‘I saw the Carnival in Trinidad, dear, with Table-Top mountain in the background’. To Freddy, everything was ‘camp’, even the most tragic circumstances. One story he told about some Third World country he visited in the Merchant Navy concerned a woman begging, holding a baby wrapped up in some rags (or more likely just a bundle of rags): ‘She said to me “Could you give me some money to bury my dead baby?” Init camp?’ Freda would say.

As well as winning the competitions in the drag balls and doing cabaret for OAP’s, Freda used to do occasional cabaret in gay pubs. We once saw him perform his dance and mime act in ‘The Cricketers’ in Battersea, just below the flats where we then lived. He had little cards printed reading: ‘The Fabulous Freda, lovely to look at, delightful to know. Taps and Tempo.’ He got some cards printed for my disco, which I was trying to get going at the time.

We got to know Freddy, and his lovely dog Sandy, quite well. Apart from our parties, he visited our flat quite a bit, and we once went on a day out to Margate together. We visited his flats in Waterloo – while we knew him he moved out of one flat into another on the same pre-war council estate just opposite the Old Vic. His flat was cluttered with drag and theatrical paraphernalia. You could hardly get into the bathroom for all the drag, including dresses with layers and layers of starched net, hanging over lines stretched above the bath.

Right to the day he died he used to tell us raunchy stories of what had happened to him either years ago, or on his way to see us in a ‘cottage’ (toilet) en route. He once told us he had ‘trade’ (sex) with a construction worker at the top of the Millbank Tower when they were still building it. If ever we were with Freddy and he happened to see someone he had once had trade with, even if it had only been a one-off like the Millbank episode, Freddy would point him out to us and say: ‘That’s one of my husbands, dear’.

I will always remember Freda with affection. Strapping on his false plastic boobs and putting on his enormous headdress which made Carmen Miranda’s look quite tame by comparison. His cabarets at our parties were something we always looked forward to.

I once wrote a poem about Freda and the stories he told us. I repeat it below, as it gives a flavor of his character. George took Freddy to the theater once, and he said Freddy talked almost non-stop, to the annoyance of the audience around them. Imagine what must have gone through their heads as they heard Freda in full flow along these lines:

 

THEM DAYS

I’ve been all over the world, my dear

I saw the Carnival in Trinidad

I remember it all so very clear

What a bona camp time we had.

***

 Our ship had just arrived in Capetown

We stood there, me and Chrissie Crow

And watched the procession march up and down

‘Course, that was them days you know.

 ***

Then Cannibal Kate, Blow-Job Annie and your muvver

A-cottaging in Melbourne did go

We didn’t get none of the other

But there were kangaroos all over the show.

 ***

So I goes up to this bona Aussie sharpie

And says: ‘Your muvver, she’s not in ‘ere,

‘Ave a piece of sponge cake, my lovely’

And ‘e said: ‘Go home you pommy queer.’

 ***

Did I tell you what happened the other day

In a cottage on Blackheath, my dear?

On two bona homies carts your muvver was plating away

That was when the fair was there last year

 ***

So I says to Bottle-Nosed Mary

Why did you go with that old tramp

She said: ‘Well when you’re a middle-aged fairy

Take whatever comes your way’, init camp?

 ***

Do you know a bitch called Miss Minge, dear?

Do you know The Painted Lady and Doodlebug Daise?

You must know them – they hustle all round here,

Not now, I’m talkin’ ‘bout them days.

 ***

Anyway, to the Embankment we trolled, dears

Hoping some nice rich steamers to meet

When Pug-Nosed Pat hollered: ‘You bleeding queers

Can piss off out of my beat’

 ***

So Miss Minge hit Pat wiv ‘er ‘andbag,

Doodlebug Daisy used her high-heeled shoe,

The Painted Lady said: ‘I’m a lady and can’t spoil my drag’

But your muvver lent a hand too.

 ***

Then a sharpie came to ol’ Pat’s rescue

I tell you, lovely, she looked a right old mess

So he says to us: ‘I’m going to arrest you’

Miss Minge yelled: ‘But I’m a Princess’.

 ***

They were bundled into the sharpie car waiting

But your muvver weren’t born yesterday you know

I said: ‘Nip up this alley ‘n’ I’ll give you a plating’

Blow-job done, the sharpie let me go.

 ***

Now when you’re talking about them days

Some bitches, they don’t believe you

But your muvver has done all that she says

It’s true, my dear, it’s true.

 ***

Was I ever in Majorca?

No dear – oh yes, I was for just one night

Or am I thinking of Jamaica

Or maybe the Isle of Wight?

 ***

Anyway, this woman on some island, lovely

Showed me a dead kid wrapped in a shawl

She wanted money to bury her baby,

Init camp, dear? Freda’s seen it all.

 ***

I saw Carrier-Bag Carrie the other day

Trying to sell a carrier bag

I said to her: ‘You bitches today

Just don’t know the meaning of drag’.

  ***

Now this dress that I won a prize in

Is real drag, don’t you see

It was given to me by Vera Lynn

Back in 1943.

 ***

The first five bob your muvver made

Was on an open-top bus doing a plating

And in the shelters for your muvver in an air-raid

Soldier and sailor boys’ carts were a-waiting.

 ***

Under Admiralty Arch, Pissy Morris for years

Was paying old tramps doing skippers

To stand there and piss all over her, dears,

Yes it’s true, init camp? Oily kippers.

 ***

She’s lovely to look at, delightful to know

And really heavenly to see,

Fabulous Freda: they still love her so,

But best were the days as an H.P. at sea.

 ***

I knew Kangeroo Kate in the last War,

She was a soldier’s wife, my dear

His breakfast was the second thing he asked for

And your muvver, she’s not in here.

 ***

Cheese or Jam?

 

Glossary of Gay Polari and slang words used in poem:

Bona = lovely, good-looking, Cottaging = looking for sex in toilets, Sharpie = policeman, Homies =men, Carts =the male organ, Plating = oral sex, Trolled = walked, Steamers = clients, Doing skippers = sleeping rough, H.P. (Homy Polone) = effeminate homosexual or bitch.

George at first thought this poem was disrespectful of Freddy Williams and could be taken as making fun of him. But it wasn’t written in this spirit – it was meant to capture as many of his sayings and stories as I could to preserve them in our memories and for posterity.

Our parties were never the same after Freda died, and eventually they petered out. As we got older we found ourselves getting less tolerant of people who wanted to stay all night, even those who lived in London and could get night buses or taxis home. It got so people were sleeping on the couch, in our spare beds, in armchairs, and staying most of the next day too, but leaving us to clear up all the mess.

Another character who came to at least one of our parties was a youngish, camp-looking Indian we called ‘Marcia the Mouse’. At this particular party I had passed out on the bed, the bedroom being screened from the living room by a curtain.
 

Marlene, an old friend of George’s, had brought her young boyfriend, Rory, to the party. Also at the party was a prostitute George knew called Maria. Suddenly Rory and Maria had climbed into the bed beside me. I was pretty far gone as Rory and Maria started performing, but since Rory was in the middle it was stimulating me somewhat, and Rory gave me a hand job. Marcia was getting so excited peeping round the door and reporting back to the kitchen what was going on. Later Rory had the cheek to ask George for a fiver ‘for doing Tony a favor.’ George gave both him, myself and Maria short shrift for our behavior at the party, though I never asked them to climb in bed with me. I don’t suppose Marlene, Rory’s girlfriend, was too pleased either.  I should not have drunk so much that I had to retire to bed and leave everything to George, but one or two drinks I and was gone, either asleep or dancing on tables.

Marcia, who lived in Guildford, sometimes made trips up to London to cruise Hampstead Heath at night. This is where we first met him. He used to take a flask of tea and sandwiches, and hide them away in a bush. We never had trade with Marcia, he was not our type, but we sometimes gave him a lift in my van afterwards, and as we talked about what had been happening on the Heath that night, Marcia would get very excited, and wanted to know every little detail. He kept interrupting with questions like:

‘Yes, Yes, but tell me darling, where was all this happening? Was it Grotto number 6 or Grotto number 7?’

Marcia had all the main bushes on the West Heath numbered in his head, starting with Grotto Number 1 on the slope behind Jack Straw’s Castle. Men tended to gather in these big bushes for sex. They are now all gone, cut down in a vain effort to stop gays having sex in one of the few traditional places in London left for them. The West Heath has been changed beyond recognition by this official vandalism which has stripped it bare of much of its shrubbery and small trees.

‘When I first came to England, my dears,’ Marcia would tell us, ‘I had no idea of all the fun that was going on in the loos.’

We visited him once in his neat little house in Guildford, and he had baked us a cake. He showed us Guildford Cathedral, but as we sat in the pews Marcia’s sex-obsessed conversation seemed inappropriate, and so George suggested we all leave.

In actual fact, our parties were far from orgies, and one of our gay friends stopped coming to them because nothing sexual ever happened. The episode of three in a bed above was an exception. Lena (in drag) sometimes hit it off with a man he had met at the drag ball, but that is about all. At one party he was sitting on a man’s lap, and admitted to us long afterwards he had a hole in his skirt and knickers and the man had been discreetly fucking him. This too was an exception.

Our parties were a mixture of straight and gay people, men and women. Some of the men were in drag and some were not. The music, prepared by George on tapes, consisted of a good mixture of dance music and slower numbers, from both his and my record collections, including some 1950s rock’n’roll. Two rock’n’rollers, Angel and Charlie, who lived in Battersea used to come along quite regularly. Roy used to provide the lighting effects with a projector-like contraption which made colored shapes seem to float about the walls and ceiling. We had some memorable parties in Ingelow Road, and our later flat at Jay Court.

In December 1973 George came with me to my firm’s Christmas party, which included a slap-up meal with Beef Wellington. I had by this time also left Overseas Telegrams and was working as a telex operator in a private firm in the City. We got this one Christmas party out of them, then I left because I could not stand the people I was working with. They had all been in the army and could talk about nothing else. I got fed up with daily quips like ‘Colonel’s lady approaching’ when the boss’s wife walked by, or ‘other ranks’ bar now open’ when the boss went out to lunch and they sneaked into his office to steal some nips of his whisky.

In March 1974 we flew from Luton airport to Rome for a few days’ holiday. From Rome a coach drove us down to Sorrento, where we spent the night. It was already late when we arrived so we saw little of it. Our hotel had orange trees laden with fruit by the swimming pool, and a view across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius, the volcano which destroyed Pompeii.
 

Very early next morning we had to be up to catch the boat to Capri. It was my 29th birthday, and it was spent on this wonderful little island where Gracie Fields once lived. Jackie, our tour guide, described it as her ‘island of dreams’. We enjoyed the coach tour round the island, and exploring the little alleyways, where we got our first taste of real Italian ice cream, made from fresh fruit. We later found a place in Rome, on one of the big squares, where they also made this delicious kind of ice cream, and also milkshakes where generous helpings of strawberries, bananas, etc. were blended into the milk while you waited. It was a great birthday treat to discover real banana ice cream on Capri, though George did make his own banana ice cream at home from evaporated milk and fresh bananas which was also delicious, though not so creamy as the Italian variety.

The next day we sailed back to the mainland where our coach took us to Pompeii, the Roman city engulfed by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius and wonderfully preserved to the present day. We had seen plenty of ruins before. (George once joked to a courier: ‘I don’t want to see any more old ruins; I’ve lived with one for years’.) Nothing, however, could prepare us for Pompeii, which actually felt like a real city. Not only were the streets and pavements perfectly preserved, also many of the shop frontages, but there were some buildings complete with their roofs, decorated inside with paintings (one in particular deemed unfit for ladies to see). It was like stepping back in time, and quite incredible that they were still standing in such a good condition. The guides pointed out the deep chariot ruts worn into one street and said they were deeper here because it was the red light district of the Roman city, and therefore busier than most streets.

After an all too short stop in Pompeii it was off to Rome for our last two nights. We visited all the sights, including the Trevi fountain. I cannot remember if we threw a coin in and made a wish, but certainly we were to return to Rome many times. Around the ruins of the Roman Forum we discovered many stray cats, which we petted and took photos of. Then all too soon, after just one full day in the Eternal City, it was back to Luton airport and home. We had packed a lot into our short 5 day trip.

On Easter Saturday, which fell in April that year, we went to see the Lindsay Kemp Company in their production of Jean Genet’s ‘Flowers’ at the Regent Theater. It was my introduction to Jean Genet’s work, and also our introduction to The Great Orlando, the blind actor who we later got to know as Jack. He turned out to be a friend of Sheila, a woman I had worked with at CND years before.

Jack lived in Battersea, and one day we picked him and his guide dog up in a taxi and took them over to Sheila’s flat in Hampstead, where we were all going on a picnic on Hampstead Heath. The cab driver was very nervous when we asked him to turn into Jack’s cul-de-sac near the River, where he shared a place with Lindsay Kemp. It looked as if no-one lived at the end of such an uninviting backwater, with warehouses each side, and the cab driver was obviously suspicious.

Our idea of a picnic was a few sandwiches, some fruit and a flask of tea, but we soon discovered Sheila and her friends had far more ambitious ideas. A friend who used to be in the student section of CND when I knew her, but was now a full-grown woman, ran around like a little kid saying: ‘I want to fly a kite, I feel like flying my kite on Hampstead Heath’. George and I, who had been lumbered with carrying the picnic basket up to the top of Parliament Hill, watched in horror as heavy crockery, cutlery, glasses, bottles of wine and containers of different kinds of salads, plus various cheeses and loaves of bread were crammed into it. We struggled over to the Heath and up the Hill, and later had to struggle down again with all the dirty eating and drinking utensils, instead of just throwing the empty paper bags away which is the joy of most picnics.

In May we went up to Edinburgh on a British Rail Merrymaker trip, which we thought would be a treat for my mother. However, unknown to us it coincided with Cup Final day, and we were made to feel guilty as my mother moaned about missing the match on TV, and kept asking people what the score was.

With intentions of doing a rock’n’roll disco, I had learnt to drive and bought an old van from our landlord, Eric. At the end of May we drove my Mum down to visit her friend Cath in the beautiful village of Porlock, in Somerset. We stayed the weekend, and on the Sunday visited the Doone Valley. We returned on George’s birthday, which was a Bank Holiday.

In early August we were off again, to the Isle of Wight for yet another one-day excursion. This was the occasion where we met up again with the parents of Michael, the school friend who had died on my 15th birthday from injuries received in a car accident. They seemed pleased to see us, and on this or another occasion gave me a color photo of Michael taken shortly before he died, and also a beautiful sculptured lamp.

Later that month we went to see Tennessee Williams’  ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ at the Piccadilly Theater, George was introducing me to all his favorite writers, playwrights and other artists, for which I will always be grateful, as they have enriched my life so much.

In late August we went to Margate.  I stayed a week with my mother at Jean’s, the landlady where we spent all our childhood holidays. Of course she had moved now to the more select Cliftonville area. George could not get time off work but stayed  over the weekend and really liked Jean. He’d introduced me to places he knew as a kid or adolescent in Scotland, now I had taken him to my childhood favorite place.
 

In the middle of October we were off on our travels again for five days in Paris with Roy, who had accompanied us to Austria, and another friend called Ray. We did all the usual tourist sights, including the top of the Eiffel Tower.

In late November was the annual C.H.E. (Campaign for Homosexual Equality) fair and disco (later superseded by the Winter Pride event). I suddenly came over ill at the disco. I had been drinking some beer, which must have triggered it off. I just felt a terrible nausea, and we had to come home. I went to my GP a day or so later, who diagnosed a stomach upset and told me to stay off work a couple of days.

By the Wednesday, however, George noticed my eyes were yellowish, and told me to go back to the doctor as I had jaundice. The doctor still thought it was a stomach upset, so I drew her attention to my eyes. She then examined me closely for the very first time, and admitted they did look ‘a bit yellow’, so sent me to hospital for a blood test. I had this done, and had been home a few hours when the phone rang. It was my GP to tell me she had received the results of the blood test, and I had hepatitis (which causes jaundice) and had to be isolated in hospital at once. An ambulance was on its way.

George was at work, so I had to ring and tell him, then rush around trying to find clean pajamas, etc.. Of course by this time I had been infectious for weeks, and was now actually feeling a bit better.

I was admitted to a hospital near Clapham South Tube station, and that first night I was so lonely and unhappy I seriously thought about climbing out of the ground floor window and going home to George. However, I stayed in my full term. There was no treatment, though I was supposed to stick to a non-fat diet and of course avoid alcohol for a long period after I left hospital. Everyone in the ward had either hepatitis A or B, yet somehow the hospital still managed to forget and serve me up a fried breakfast, which I refused to eat on medical grounds. I have since been told people with diabetes are regularly offered sugary desserts by incompetent hospital staff. One patient accepted these, got worse, had to have her legs amputated, and subsequently died. Another patient (our friend Rose) had the sense to refuse the dessert, but hospitals really should make sure patients are not offered food forbidden by their medical conditions.
 

The hospital I was in took regular blood tests, and George had to go for one but was OK. I could not understand why so many people visited me in hospital, including people I used to work with ages before. Only years later did I learn George had organized all this, to make sure I had visitors every day.

Of course George was the most regular visitor, and whilst in hospital I finished writing a novel. George suggested I dedicate it, not to a person, but to: ‘Hepatitis, without which this book would never have been completed.’ I did include this dedication as it was perfectly true. The book was never published, and was really just a variation on the old ‘Dracula’ theme, though I thought at the time it had some original twists. I came out of hospital fully recovered, but was warned it would have to be a ‘dry Christmas’ (i.e. no alcohol) if I was not to suffer a relapse.

 

That Christmas George spent in Hastings with Rose and Neil, and I spent with my mother. George did not get his Christmas dinner till the day after Boxing Day. Whilst we filled ourselves with turkey and other goodies, when George phoned Christmas Day we heard he had just had some slices of pork luncheon meat as Rose was too busy watching TV, and Neil was not prepared to do the dinner all by himself. When George rang Boxing Day he had still only had some slices of corned beef or something similar, but no turkey or Christmas pudding.

My brother was spending Christmas with me and my mother, and he came with me in the van to Hastings the day after Boxing Day to visit Rose and Neil and bring George back. Although Rose is outrageously camp, Philip got on all right with everybody. He was especially pleased that we arrived just in time for Christmas lunch, delayed two days.

Neil always insists on serving big meals, which is why Rose put on weight as soon as he moved to Hastings. We had huge portions of turkey and piles of vegetables, followed by enormous slabs of Neil’s home-made Christmas pudding and about half a carton of cream each to pour over it. Philip was in his element.

I will never forget the nightmare drive home. We had probably all had a drink, but Philip offered to drive the van back to London. It was the worst thing we could have agreed too. He was determined to show off and drove like a maniac all the way, with me and George too terrified to say anything in case he drove even faster. The roads between Hastings and London were narrow, winding country lanes, and Philip was tearing along them on the wrong side of the road. It only needed a car to come in the opposite direction round a bend for us to have a head-on collision, but somehow we got home safely.

It was my second and last experience of being driven by my brother Philip. The previous occasion was on the Yorkshire Moors with Philip and his fellow pot-holers. I was sitting in the back of a truck on some boxes as we bumped along over the moors with huge pot-holes dropping hundreds of feet each side. I only found out what the boxes contained when we went over a huge bump and Philip turned round and said to me:

‘Are you OK sitting on that jelly?’ He was referring to the gelignite with which they later had to blast some of the rock away to get one of the pot-holers out of a narrow crack he had crawled into.

On New Year’s Eve we had one of our big parties and we moved into 1975, which was to be another year of travelling.

At the end of February we flew off to Majorca, with my mother and George’s friend Andre, who was not French but Irish. He hustled regularly in drag, and this other guise was known as ‘Angela’. On at least one occasion he came to our party in full drag. However, he left his wigs and frocks at home when he went on holiday with us.

We stayed in Magalluf, then a very new resort with building works everywhere. Being so early in the year, it was not beach weather, but we had a pleasant holiday and traveled all over the island.

We used to travel into Palma de Mallorca by bus, and on one occasion Andre, George and myself went into Woolworth’s in Palma and saw my mother stuffing herself with a big cream cake. We were very surprised as we had asked if she wanted to come with us into town, and she had said she was too tired and wanted to rest. We crept up behind her and said:

‘Greedy pig’.

She ignored us at first, then looked round guiltily realizing the words really were directed at her. She explained she kept thinking about these cakes and just had to jump on the bus and come and get one.

On the one occasion we did lie on the beach, George had just closed his eyes when a gipsy woman came up to him rattling beads in his face. When he continued to ignore her she shook him till he opened his eyes, and George gave her a mouthful of abuse. It is a bit much if you cannot doze on a beach without someone waking you up to sell you a load of old tat.

There was a bar we went to where George, Andre and I danced with some elderly French ladies. George and Andre later laughed happily as they exchanged comments on the rigid steel-like corsets you became aware they were wearing when you danced with them.

We took the train ride to the north of the island, where we transferred to a tram. Here we were embarrassed as my mother went up to an old tramp outside the cathedral and offered him a cigarette. Typical of my mother, although this kind of action got her into some awkward situations. On a holiday to Russian in 1970, just before I met George, Mum had started talking in English to a man next to her on a tram, and the man, who only spoke Russian and evidently thought he was being chatted up, grabbed hold of her knee. My mother could not understand why he had done this when she was just explaining to him how nice it was to visit Russia and have a nostalgic ride on a tram. One week after arriving in Majorca we were back home again. 
 

In April we went to a party at Andre’s basement flat near Hammersmith. Someone gave George a ‘Black Bomber’ pill, and I was horrified, and pleaded with George not to take it. Little did I know then he had been taking amphetamines for years, but he never tried the really hard drugs such as cocaine or heroin. However, I would not recommend anyone to start on ‘uppers’ as it is very easy to become dependent on them, as George did.  They caused depression when their effect wore off, and amphetamines messed up George’s life, also making our relationship very difficult at times.

In late May we went for a long weekend in Amsterdam. It was our first visit to this city, and we went on a special gay trip by coach. Most of the coach party had been before, and knew all the clubs. Many were older than us, and as we arrived early Saturday morning, having traveled all night, many rushed off to the day sauna. We checked into our hotel and had a rest before exploring this delightful little city.

On that first occasion we were not all that impressed with the gay scene there. Perhaps we did not know the right places to go. Certainly the DOK and similar big discos we visited were little different from the ones in London. We discovered Vondel Park, a sort of open-air cruising ground after dark, similar to London’s Hampstead Heath. It is a very long, narrow park, and after walking for what seemed miles we spotted a policeman in uniform. On Hampstead Heath this would have caused gays to run for their lives, but in Amsterdam the police see that you are gay and direct you to the cruising area where gays gather to have sex. It was all so very civilized compared to nanny-state Britain, which was still 50 years behind the times.

On later trips we discovered the excellent Amsterdam gay backroom clubs and bars, which avoid the need to frequent public parks and toilets. Moreover, the Amsterdam venues tend to be very inexpensive. Most have free entry, and drinks are normal prices. Where there is an entry fee (for the gay cinemas and saunas for instance) these are reasonable, and you are given a ticket allowing you to come and go as you please for the rest of the evening.

One poor bitch in the Amsterdam coach party seemed to spend most of the weekend in one of those iron urinals by a canal near our hotel, offering cigarettes to attractive men who came in. This may be the way she was forced to get trade in Britain, but everywhere else you go to a gay backroom club or a gay brothel, which is less of a nuisance for everyone concerned.

During the coach trip we got chatting to several camp queens, and it seemed one of them worked for a London borough council as a carpenter. He was by no means young and so was perhaps old enough to know better, but he claimed to be personally responsible for drilling ‘glory holes’ in several cottages in the borough. Of course, this would be regarded by the authorities as vandalization, but it was the direct result of Britain’s ridiculous laws at the time which made proper backrooms illegal until the 21^st Century. We traveled back from Amsterdam on the late May Bank holiday.

That August, George’s eldest nephew, also named George, came down to stay with us. It was his first visit to London. Almost as soon as he arrived he went round to the nearest pub, but came back a few minutes later disappointed. They could not understand a word he said. In broad Glaswegian he had gone in and demanded:

‘Gi’s a pinta heavy and 20 Regal’.

Apart from the accent, the barman was not to know that ‘heavy’ in Glasgow is a kind of draft beer, and ‘Regal’ was a kind of cigarette not then available south of the border.

He had similar problems when we took him up Speakers’ Corner on the Sunday afternoon. He was particularly fascinated by an Irish woman named Mary and her friend from Leeds, who used to praise the Irish Republican cause and spout a lot of anti-Jewish propaganda. They were so over the top, it was amusing to watch and listen to them, but young George got all upset and started trying to argue with them.
 

Mary, who had always loudly and proudly proclaimed that she considered herself not British but Irish, complained she could not understand a word he said, and called him a ‘bloody foreigner’. We pointed out she was a foreigner too, whereupon she insisted she was British. Of course, young George was British too, but it was pointless pursuing the argument with such irrational people who changed their nationality to suit the circumstances. Her favorite phrase was: ‘If you’re Jewish they put you in the House of Lords, if you’re Irish they put you in Long Kesh’. (The latter was later more commonly known as The Maze.) 

She once accused me of being a foreigner too, saying: ‘Will you look at you with the foreign nose sticking out of the face of you’. On another occasion she claimed the Queen had looked out of the window of Buckingham Palace and saw Vera Lynn walking by, said to herself: ‘What a lovely schnozzle, I must knight it’ and that’s how she became Dame Vera Lynn according to Irish Mary.

In September we celebrated our fifth anniversary by going to see ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’. This remained one of our favorite camp musicals, and we loved all the songs from it. We saw both movie and stage versions several times, as well as having the soundtrack album.

A few days later we embarked on a trip to Italy which was virtually a ‘Tour of Europe’. Starting off in Belgium, we went through West Germany and Switzerland to Italy, going also through Luxemburg on the return journey (unfortunately we were both asleep when we passed through the Grand Duchy so missed it on this occasion).
 

On arrival at Ostend there was a delay, and it seemed our courier had not arrived. At the last minute Maria had to stand in, and she was not at all happy about it. Soon after we started she told us it was better we gave our money to her for meals en route, to save changing it into so many different currencies. At our first stop, a self-service restaurant, Maria ordered the cheapest dish on the menu for everybody, and when anyone tried to select a little extra such as a cake Maria came and snatched it away from them saying they were not allowed it, even if they paid for it separately. If there was no money in it for Maria, we could not have it. It was obvious she had told the staff to give us the cheapest food on the menu.

A little Welsh widow was traveling on her own. The endless coach journey was a bit too much for her, as she often nodded off to sleep and so missed much of Italy. Her husband had recently died and left her a bit of money. She had planned a world cruise, but in the meantime took this Italian trip.

When Maria came to her on the coach to collect money for the optional excursions, this poor woman handed her Spanish pesetas. Instead of helping her, Maria went berserk:

‘Why you bring pesetas on this holiday? We go to Italy, not Spain. Give me lira or sterling please.’

The poor woman was confused, as Maria snatched her precious sterling and moved on down the coach. We tried to explain to the woman, but she could not understand why this foreign money was not acceptable in foreign parts. Apparently the last time she went abroad it was with her husband, and he had arranged the currency. They had obviously gone to Spain or one of the Spanish islands, because for the current trip she had gone to the bank and simply asked for some of ‘that foreign money we had last time’, presumably showing the bank the receipt for the pesetas.

Stuck all through the holiday with Spanish pesetas nobody wanted, the poor woman was even seen outside the hotel in Venice, her open handbag stuffed with useless peseta notes, begging a postcard seller to take as much as he liked, she just wanted to be rid of this foreign money. Instead, everyone, including the postcard seller, grabbed her sterling. Fortunately, she seemed to have enough of this to see her through the holiday.  (What a pity the Euro didn’t exist in those days!)

Although we enjoyed the trip, it was something of a disaster from start to finish. The sun roof blew off crossing a mountain pass near Innsbruck on the way to Italy, and our courier abandoned the trip and ran off with the money half way through.

Maria already had a bad reputation with the hotels en route, as some of them would not allow her on their premises. Our hotel in the Rome area was located in a village outside the city, which was disappointing as we expected to be in Rome itself. To make matters worse, Maria treated us like a herd of cattle. Instead of allocating rooms properly, she tried to split friends, husbands and wives by holding up keys and shouting:

‘I want three mens or three womens to share this room’.

George told her to allocate the rooms properly, and eventually she did, though obviously it was really too much trouble for her that late in the day, for we had arrived sometime near midnight.

Next morning we had to insist she gave us a lift into Rome on the tour bus. Maria was extremely reluctant to do this because we had not booked on any of the ‘optional’ excursions. At first she refused point blank, but when we insisted we were booked to see Rome and we had every right to travel in on the tour bus she eventually relented. However there was still a problem over lunch. We had booked full board, but the lunch was to be taken at a restaurant. Maria tried to suggest if we did not come on the ‘optional’ tours we would have to miss lunch, but we made her agree to pick us up for lunch where she dropped us off. We were there well before the appointed time, but Maria tried to make the coach drive right past us till the other passengers made her stop and pick us up.

We were never very popular with couriers because we preferred to make our own way around cities rather than go on expensive optional tours. On one Rome visit the courier had been furious when George interrupted her as she was just about to persuade two elderly ladies behind us on the coach to go on the expensive evening Rome sightseeing tour the day we arrived. They were dithering because of the high cost, so George turned round and said:

‘Excuse me, you can get into the center of Rome by bus for about the equivalent of four pence. You don’t need to pay pounds for the coach to take you in.’

They were very grateful and decided not to go on the evening tour, but of course the courier was furious, telling George to mind his own business. On one occasion we got a bus from outside our hotel, paid the equivalent of a few pence in lira and arrived at the Coliseum before the tour party. They were amazed when they arrived and found us already there, and dismayed when they learned it had cost us pence instead of pounds.

It soon became apparent to everyone what a trickster Maria was because she disappeared in Italy with all the money she had collected for optional tours, etc.. We had to come all the way back to England without a courier. The passengers elected someone from their midst to do the essential courier duties, and we all wrote a joint letter of protest to the tour company. Eventually we got a refund.

Despite all the mishaps, or maybe because of them, it was a holiday to remember. We visited Ostend and Brussels, in Belgium, Aachen in Germany, Lugano and Lucerne in Switzerland, and Vipitino (Sterzing), Signa, Padua, Venice, Florence, Rome and Lido di Ostia in Italy, also making additional scenic stops, and we got a glimpse of Innsbruck nestled in a valley.

George was already planning another trip to Amsterdam, but I decided not to go this time as we had been so recently and I had been rather disappointed with the gay scene there (not having really discovered it). So the next month I went up to Whitehall with George, and saw him and Andre on the coach to Amsterdam for the weekend. It was another trip organized by gays for gays, and it seems they had a camp time. Andre fancied a black guy in the coach, and George ended up locked out of their hotel bedroom half the night whilst Andre ‘entertained’ him. Still, George came back on the Monday and had apparently enjoyed himself. It was the first of a few separate holidays we took in the 21 years we were together.

A month later, at the end of November, we saw Dorothy Squires together at the London Palladium. This was the visit which kicked off our second relationship crisis, since George felt I only went on sufferance. Refusing to accompany him on the second Amsterdam trip was also a factor.

We went down to Hastings just before Christmas, which we spent with my mother. Boxing Day we had a little party with some gay friends round, and we ended up the year again at the New Year’s Eve Drag Ball.

 11. LAST YEARS AT INGELOW ROAD

Early in May 1976 we flew from Luton with Ray and another friend, Andre, to Rome for a week’s holiday. Having been twice before we were able to show them all the sights, and also visited some new to us including the catacombs, the E.U.R. development designed in the Mussolini period, and the Tivoli gardens just outside Rome, with all their fountains. We also made a return trip to Lido di Ostia, the seaside resort a short train ride from the capital.

There was one unpleasant incident during the holiday. We all agreed to visit a local gay cruising area in a central Rome park one evening. We split up once there, but unseen by them I overheard Ray and Andre talking about us, and it was not very flattering. I cannot remember the details, but Ray was saying cruising was not his scene and running us down, and Andre was agreeing with him, turning nasty, and accusing me of being George’s trained monkey, spying for him and reporting back. It did add a sour note to the holiday.

Arriving back in Luton, Ray’s snobbish boyfriend met us in his car. Our flight was a little late, and so he started to lecture Ray about going on ‘cheap charter flights’ and package holidays. This was obviously for our benefit, but although he and Ray had flown quite a few places together on scheduled flights, working for an airline he got either free or heavily discounted tickets. It was an unpleasant end to what would have been a pleasant holiday, had it not been for Ray’s snobbishness and Andre trying to keep in with him.

Eventually we lost touch with Ray altogether, when I foolishly disobeyed George’s instructions by putting on a gay blue movie when showing off our Super-8 films and projector. I should have heeded George’s warning of course, though I think we both agreed later Ray’s friendship was no great loss.

Andre and George remained on speaking terms till the day he died, and George even helped Andre by getting him off the game and into a proper job, where George worked. I think they were always wary of each other though, and each knew better than to cross the other one.

 Looming up in July was a holiday I had planned in East Germany. It was, of course, my idea, and originally George had not planned to come with me. I went ahead and booked for myself, and was due to sail from Harwich to Hamburg, then go to Berlin by train. George later changed his mind and said he would come with me, but wanted to fly direct, so I altered the booking. I never knew what brought about his decision to accompany me, but perhaps he was thinking along the lines of my mother when she decided to come with me to the Soviet Union in 1970, fearing I might defect. More probably, he wanted to see Eastern Europe for himself, and point out some of the deficiencies of the system to me

We flew out to West Berlin, where an East German chauffeur-driven car met us. It was so unusual to see an East German-registered car on the streets of West Berlin that people stopped and stared as we went by, wondering what important personages were being driven around their half of the city in a very up-market East German limousine. The driver said very little until The Wall was spotted with the distinctive East Berlin TV tower behind it, whereupon he gestured towards it and exclaimed proudly: ‘D-D-R’, the German initials for the East German state.

We were whisked through Checkpoint Charlie with the minimum of fuss and arrived at our hotel, where other people on the package holiday had already arrived by various means of transport. We could get little information as to what was happening, and George remarked that this was the ‘couldn’t care less tour’. The courier, when he showed up, definitely had this attitude. No doubt visitors from the West who admired the German Democratic Republic enough to visit it were not very popular with some ordinary East Germans.

We were staying in the Hotel Stadt Berlin, a modern skyscraper block in the rather bleak Alexanderplatz development close to the TV tower. We had a little walk around that evening, and George remarked how deserted and depressing it all looked. This was my first view of the GDR capital through a skeptic’s eyes. To me it was a bright, modern, Socialist city, but I had to admit there was a lack of life and soul as we looked out of our hotel window at the wide, almost deserted streets far below.
 

The next day, Friday, we boarded our coach for our journey southwest to Wittenberg, and the church where Martin Luther started the Reformation. It was rather strange to learn all this religious history in an officially atheist state, but the Church was very strong in East Germany, and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was one of the political parties in the Communist-led coalition which ruled the country.

We then drove further south for our overnight stop in Leipzig, but we saw very little of this city, as our group had opted to visit Colditz Castle, which took up most of our time. What we did see of Leipzig was extremely depressing. The huge, dirt-grimed Battle of the Nations Monument, a similarly soot-blackened railway terminus, a very early morning glimpse of St Thomas Church and the old town hall with the modern, skyscraper block of the Karl Marx University in the background. If Berlin seemed depressing, Leipzig was even worse.

I believe it was in Leipzig (or possibly Dresden) a woman asked us for directions to the ‘plastic park’. This was, in fact, a daring open-air exhibition of Henry Moore-type modern sculptures.
 

One woman in our group had come on the holiday especially to see a penfriend living in Leipzig, and she met her in the hotel that evening and went off to stay overnight at her home. The other people on the holiday were nearly all admirers of the ‘first Socialist State on German soil’, to use a Communist cliche. Except one, who was a fanatical supporter of Enver Hoxha’s ultra-Stalinist Albania. She was a tall, thin elderly lady with frizzy white hair and glasses, whom we nicknamed ‘Albanian Alice’. Everything we saw was unfavorably compared with a previous visit to Albania. On one occasion we were in a restaurant for our included meal, and she was asked what she would like to drink. She had decided not to spend one DDR Mark on any extras such as drinks on the holiday, and asked for water. The local water was evidently not very good for drinking and they were reluctant to give it to her, whereupon she remarked that you could have as much water as you liked in Albania. That seemed to do the trick, for a glass of water was very quickly provided for her and the reputation of GDR versus Albanian Socialism was thus saved: both could provide drinking water with lunch. Lenin would have been proud of this glorious achievement!

Colditz Castle, famous in Britain for its role as a P.O.W. camp in the War and the various escape attempts, was practically unknown in East Germany. It was simply a psychiatric institution outside Leipzig. Our courier seemed perplexed that we should want to be driven to see such an uninteresting place, and of course we never got to see the inside, just the external view of a rather disappointing looking building from its courtyard. Its position on a craggy hill above the town of Colditz is what made it so impregnable and difficult to escape from, otherwise it was very unremarkable.

Next morning we were driven southwest via Erfurt to the town of Suhl in Thuringia, where we stayed three nights in an hotel on the main square. The modern buildings around the square were decorated with flags for the ‘Free Word’ newspaper’s festival. George lost no time in commenting on the irony of the paper’s name.

Our hotel bedroom window looked out on the main square, where this beer festival kept us awake till the early hours. Still, we enjoyed walking round the food and beer stalls. There were also some fairground rides, and dancing on one corner of the square. We nearly got burnt passing a stall where they were grilling meat and sausages on a barbecue, as boiling oil splashed out on the pavement in front of us and caught fire. Luckily, no-one was hurt.

We also climbed a hill in the older part of town to a kind of fort which gave a panoramic view over the Thuringian forests. One member of our group, evidently bored by the attractions of Suhl, boarded a train to a nearby town. This was strictly illegal, as our visas listed all the towns in the GDR we were visiting, and you were not supposed to deviate from this itinerary without permission. However, no-one checked her visa, so it seemed freedom of movement within the GDR was possible even for visitors.

On the Monday we were driven northwest to Eisenach, very near the border with West Germany. Here we saw Bach’s house, and visited the Wartburg Castle high on a hill. The East German Wartburg motorcar was made in Eisenach, and took its name from the castle.

We were taken round what seemed like every room of this castle by a stern looking guide, who locked us in as he gave us facts and figures about almost every painting, statue and piece of furniture. We had experienced this practice of being locked in before, when we were taken round a church. This is one way of insuring tourists do not wander away from the guide, but it was a very uncomfortable feeling. A small child screamed with the boredom of it all, and the mother got a very hostile look from the guide. I believe the door was eventually unlocked so she and the child could escape the ordeal. Of course, George remarked to me that a country which walls in its people also feels it has to lock visitors into churches and castles to prevent them escaping.

We returned to Suhl for the night, and next day went north to Weimar and nearby Buchenwald. The terrible, oppressive, evil atmosphere of the place was felt even on the road to the former Nazi extermination camp. Once there we saw the various statues and memorials, and our group laid flowers on a memorial to British victims. There was also a macabre exhibition on the site, which George declined to visit. I did, and the horror of lampshades made of human skin and similar objects remain with me today.

One member of our group, another white-haired woman, came out of this exhibition clutching her camera, and commented to George:

‘It was not as good as Auschwitz’, which she had visited previously on a trip to Poland.

George was astounded and horrified, and replied: ‘Good?’ How could anybody use that adjective about such horrific places, unless they were pervertedly turned-on by such atrocities? From then on we categorized ‘Auschwitz Annie’ with Albanian Alice as two of the weirdos on this holiday.

We stayed overnight in Erfurt at the Elephant Hotel, from the balcony of which Hitler once made a speech. Inside it was quite luxurious, with a TV in our bedroom on which we were able to watch both East and West German TV. George pointed out to me how frustrating it must be for ordinary East Germans to daily see TV commercials for products not readily available to them. Western products could only be bought in hard-currency Intershops. However many DDR citizens had West German Marks sent to them by relatives living in the Federal Republic.

Next day we were driven east to Dresden, stopping on the way at the town of Meissen to see the famous porcelain being produced. What is known to the world as ‘Dresden china’ is actually made in this town a few miles outside the city of Dresden.

We spent three nights in Dresden, and we were taken around the reconstructed Zwinger, which had been completely destroyed in the devastating British air raids. The city center was quite modern, and was the first place where we came across the lovely ‘dandelion clock’ type fountains, which we later discovered in other countries.

In a big department store in Dresden we picked up a self-service plastic basket and started going round, but the staff were so rude and unhelpful we gave up in the end and came out without buying anything. George remarked again on the ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude prevalent everywhere in the country. It was also very noticeable that prices in the shops were sky-high for GDR-made electrical goods sold far cheaper in the West. I was shocked to see a GDR food mixer I had bought cheaply mail-order through the Communist ‘Morning Star’ newspaper in Britain priced many times what I had paid here in the country where it was made. Nevertheless rents, transport and basic foodstuffs were heavily subsidized by the State; luxury goods were more expensive.

One woman in our party wandered off on her own in Dresden and got lost. We were due to go somewhere on the coach, and everybody was getting anxious, especially the courier. Suddenly a Vopo (Volkspolizei or People’s Policeman) roared up on his motorcycle, with the missing woman riding behind him and clutching on for grim death. She was wearing a green Vopo crash helmet emblazoned with the East German emblem, and I think was thoroughly enjoying herself pretending to be a GDR people’s policewoman.

On our last day in Dresden we were due to drive east to see the unusual rock formations in Saxon Switzerland, as the area is known. However, we never got that far due to lack of time (possibly due to waiting for the Vopo to deliver our lost fellow traveler). We did visit the Koenigstein Fortress with its magnificent views. Next day we visited Cecilienhof Palace where the Potsdam agreement was signed and also the Sans Souci estate. I had visited both during a visit in 1968. On this occasion, however, we noticed that the ‘Berlin Wall’ (which encircled West Berlin) cut right across the bottom of the garden of Cecilienhof, barring access to the lake beyond, which was part of West Berlin. We walked right up to the inner wire fence with the Wall just beyond it. Just at this point it looked as easy to hop over as any other garden wall, despite the sinister looking watchtower to our right. No doubt anyone attempting such an escapade would have been shot before they got very far, since the actual GDR border was always well beyond the Wall itself. Those West Berliners who painted on the Wall were in fact standing on GDR territory in order to do so.

We had two more nights in Berlin before flying back to London. We visited the Soviet War memorial in Treptow Park, and I took George to the nearby Kultur Park fun fair. We visited all the East Berlin sights, but what delighted us most of all was a little fountain near the Red Town Hall, the TV Tower and the Alexanderplatz complex. It was a small sculpture on a pedestal, consisting of three figures – a man with a half-closed umbrella, a man with a barrel and a peasant woman with some washing. Water trickled from the umbrella, barrel and washing. I know George thought this little fountain was the most beautiful and impressive thing in the whole of East Germany.

The gay scene, which I remembered so fondly from my 1968 visit, and which had proved to me that Socialism and gay liberation could go hand-in-hand, seemed sadly non-existent. At least we never found it. The Mocca coffee bar and nearby G (gay) bar where the scene had been so outrageously blatant eight years before had gone, or were no longer gay. All we found was the sad little City Klause Cafe, with a few depressed looking gays sitting round. There had either been a clampdown since my last visit, or the gay bars had moved elsewhere in the city. This, as much as anything else, helped disillusion me with the GDR in particular and Stalinist style Socialism in general. I so wanted to show George the flourishing, liberated gay scene in the GDR capital.

We returned in style through Checkpoint Charlie in our chauffeur-driven limousine, and flew back to London. Nothing would ever be the same again, as my illusions about Communism in general and the GDR as the model, efficient, modern, Socialist, gay-liberated State had been shattered. It was, at best, an imperfect Socialism marred by a corrupt ruling clique, as with all the Socialist countries.

A few weeks later I knocked on the door of the Secretary of the local Communist Party branch. She was out, so I left all the Treasurer’s papers and books in a carrier-bag in a little cubby-hole near her dustbins with a note saying I was resigning as Treasurer. She scolded me afterwards in a furious letter, accusing me of being ‘emotionally unstable’ (apparently her codeword for ‘being in a gay relationship with a non-Communist’) for rejecting the Stalinist values she thought I shared with her. I apologized for leaving the local Party’s accounts in such a publicly accessible place, but explained how all my illusions were shattered and I just wanted to cut all my ties with the Party. If you do not want to go through the same experience, I wrote, then never visit a Socialist country with someone you care for who sees things as they really are and who will point out all the defects of the system to you.

The red-colored spectacles had finally been removed from my eyes, and I never felt so closely drawn to Soviet or East German style Communism again. It took me a long while to sort my ideas out, before I decided I was in favor of a sort of market socialism, keeping the best of both socialist and capitalist systems as they had in former Yugoslavia. This involves various worker cooperatives and other publicly/socially owned and controlled enterprises competing against each other, not capitalist multi-nationals moving in and dominating the market.

I do believe all the Socialist countries achieved an awful lot despite their imperfections, and the GDR was, along with Yugoslavia, one of the most successful: full employment, good public services, good education and health services (illiteracy was wiped out in Russia and elsewhere), security in old age, rights for women, etc.  Just a pity in 1989-1991 they didn’t build on the good points, try a more efficient Socialist model (such as the Yugoslav one) and correct the things that were wrong.

I still believe the Berlin Wall surrounding West Berlin was an absolute necessity, given that capitalist West Berlin was in the middle of the GDR. Before the Wall was built West Berliners could come over and strip the East Berlin shops of cheap subsidized foodstuffs causing shortages, whilst East Berliners enjoying subsidized rents, public transport, foodstuffs, etc. could commute and get higher paid jobs in West Berlin (where rents, basic foodstuffs, etc. were much higher) paying taxes to the West Berlin authorities. This practice and people moving from East to West, especially scientists and other professionals, was bleeding the East German state dry. But mining the border and shooting people trying to cross illegally was unacceptable.

GDR citizens of pensionable age were free to visit the West, but it should have been made possible for all to cross the border both ways on payment of deposits/export taxes for East and West Berliners. Those commuting from one half of the city to another for work should have paid taxes to both authorities.

A city with two diametrically opposed political/economic systems obviously had to have a physical barrier between them. Even the USA is building and protecting a high security fence between itself and Mexico. All countries have a need to control emigration and immigration.

George and I grew very close politically in later years, and both of us admired the Yugoslav form of Socialism. I suppose we were both left of center in most things without being dogmatic, for we were both aware the pendulum can swing too far either way.

By now we were both working at an Australian company which only involved about half a day’s work for a full day’s pay. They agreed to let George and me staff their telex room, even though we went on holidays together every year, rather than advertise for a telex operator. This suited us, and it was a good job even if the atmosphere was rather Victorian.

The two directors were brothers and they called all the male staff by their surnames only, with no title. Many of the staff had been there since leaving school decades ago and knew nothing of the modern office. Hilda, supposedly a filing clerk, sat looking at Argos catalogs most of the day, planning new accessories for the luxurious ladies room. Meanwhile the men had to make do with a dingy basement room full of unwanted furniture when we took our tea breaks.

George and I had to go into the filing room each day to file the telexes, and when George went in one September day Hilda looked up from the Argos catalog with dreamy eyes and said:  ‘Time to be thinking about Christmassy things.’

George could not stand Christmas at the best of times, and having to sit with this silly woman prattling on about decorations for the office before we had even taken our summer holidays was just too much. One sunny day, when the ex-Company Secretary had died and the directors and several staff members were going to the service, I met Hilda on the stairs and she smiled and whimpered: ‘Lovely day for a funeral.’

Of course she was not as silly as she sounded, for she had the managers wrapped around her little finger and could get whatever she wanted. She had been with the firm about 30 years, and at the annual ladies’ supper it is reported she sat at the head of the table like the Queen. This was a Christmas treat for the female staff members. The men, if we were lucky, got rusty cans of lager unfit for sale to the public.

One year a man who was very bitter at having been made redundant from quite a good job, was employed as the postal clerk. I saw him bashing a pack of cans of lager viciously on the corner of his work surface, till all the cans were dented. He was supposed to be dispatching them for customers’ Christmas orders.

‘That’s another lot of lager that will come back’, he said triumphantly, having assured the male staff got their liquid Christmas bonus that year. He absolutely hated the Directors, who were born in Australia but had thoroughly British accents and mannerisms. One of them asked the postal clerk to fill his fountain pen, so he soaked pieces of blotting paper in the ink before filling it, and mixed in some cold tea for good measure.

‘That’s the last time that old fool will ask me to fill his bloody pen for him’, he said. ‘Who do they think they are? They used to run around the Outback with a load of Abbos, with the arse hanging out of the back of their trousers.’

The genuine Australians, when they came over, were treated like gods. Most of the staff practically knelt down in front of them. The wife of one of these Australian directors was visiting Scotland, and rang down to the office in London for some Fortnum and Masons’ envelopes as she had run out. The receptionist obediently took down all the details and went running off to the store, then arranged for them to be posted up to Scotland. How madam managed in Australia without Fortnum and Masons’ envelopes I have no idea. Quite possibly the receptionist kept her supplied regularly.

Still, we were glad of the job while it lasted. The Directors were a bit stuffy, but did not treat us badly. The wages and holidays were quite generous really, and our hours were just fantastic.

It was on a Saturday in December we did our first gay disco together at one of the Porchester Hall drag balls. We spent Christmas together with Rose and Neil in Hastings, and visited my mother two days afterwards. The next year was to be the last in our first flat together.

In January 1977 we did a disco in Hackney. It was a Communist Party gig booked before I left the Party, but we did it anyway. After playing Brenda Lee’s ‘Let’s Jump The Broomstick’ a woman later came up to us and in a jolly middle-class accent requested ‘the one about the bean-pole’.

The first Sunday in February we went together to see one of George’s favorite actresses in one of his all-time favorite films: Maggie Smith in ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.’ He later did a sketch which I still have on video in which he played the part of Miss Jean Brodie giving ‘her gels’ a sex education lesson in his best, refined Edinburgh accent. (George had lost his Scottish accent years before he met me. His native Glaswegian accent is quite different from that of Edinburgh.)
 

Our actress friend Pat threw a party in her Soho flat in late February. She had three cats, all with very posh names. Everyone was sitting around in her main room overlooking Walker’s Court and the Raymond Revue Bar. In the middle of the room was a cat-litter tray. One of the cats came over and made very smelly use of it in full view of all the guests, and Pat simply smiled and said: ‘Oh look everybody, how sweet. Clarissa’s using her tray.’ I arrived at the party late, but George told me what I had missed.

We did a disco in February for the wedding of a work colleague of my mother’s. We played a mixture of rock’n’roll, 60s and 70s pop music and Country’n’Western. I started to play Hank Snow’s ‘Nobody’s Child’ but George told me to take it off quickly. I had completely forgotten the bride was blind, and the song I had been about to play is a Country weepie about a blind orphan nobody wants to adopt. Fortunately we stopped the record during the intro before anyone realized my awful mistake.

At Easter we had a short trip up to Glasgow to visit George’s relatives, later that month (April) we flew off for a week in Malta, staying at Balluta Bay near Sliema, a suburb of Valetta. It was good weather and we enjoyed our holiday, traveling all over the island and also visiting neighboring Gozo. Malta is very dry with not much greenery, and only one decent sandy beach. Golden Bay was a bus ride away at an isolated corner miles from Valetta, near an army firing range. We had a nice day there, but otherwise used the more rocky beaches. We also visited the ‘Silent City’ of Mdina, and ancient ruins on Gozo.

We came back with plenty of pictures of cacti and palm trees, which all looked very exotic. We were in Valetta on May 1st for the ruling Labour Party’s May Day parade. There were some colorful floats made entirely of flowers, though it was more on the scale of Battersea Park’s Easter Parade than the Red Square parade in Moscow.

Malta is a strong Catholic country, and all the buses had little shrines in the front above the driver, alongside the girlie pin-ups. We were walking along a street in Old Valetta’s red light district, and the girls were so desperate to get a client they literally grabbed hold of George’s arm and tried to drag him away from me and into a dive. George had to pull away quite violently, but such forceful tactics were not usually necessary. When approached by a prostitute near the Pigalle in Paris it was sufficient for George to say in French:

‘I’m looking for a man’ whereupon the girl got the message and replied: ‘Moi aussi’ (‘Me also’).

This was to be my year of visiting Mediterranean islands, for shortly before visiting Malta and Gozo, my Dad had invited me to pay my first visit to Cyprus at his expense later in the year.

We spent the weekend at Hastings mainly to get away from the Silver Jubilee celebrations. They had decorated our Victorian street with flags, but fortunately nobody had asked to attach any of this bunting to our house. Both we and our landlord were anti-royalist. Ours was one of the few houses in the street without any patriotic red, white and blue decorations in the windows. They were threatening to hold a children’s street party on the Saturday, and this was just too much – if there was anything we hated more than jingoism and poncing royals, it was spoilt, screaming brats. We jumped in my old van and we were off to see Rose and Neil on the Sussex coast, leaving the royalists and sprogs to take over our street for the day.

In August George’s sister Margaret arrived at Victoria coach station with her little daughter, ‘Wee’ Margaret. His sister had recently been widowed when her husband, George, died suddenly from a heart attack. We had a funny relationship with him – sometimes he seemed hostile and hardly spoke a word, but the last time we saw him when visiting Glasgow he had been very friendly towards us, chatting away and joking.

We drove the two Margarets down to Windsor and visited the safari park, and also took them around London – Carnaby Street, The Tower and all the usual tourist sights. They loved the free children’s zoo in Battersea Park.

The following week we went up to Glasgow for Margaret’s son John’s wedding. After my own George’s funeral, Margaret told her sister Betty that she never realized George was gay, but I find this very hard to believe. Certainly John seemed to know, for he told George he would not think of inviting him to his wedding without me.

In September I flew off to Cyprus with my dad, and met many of my relations for the first time, including my paternal grandmother. My brother, Philip, had met her and my grandfather during a visit in 1966, but on that occasion I had already booked to go to the USSR on my very first trip abroad, so had to forego Cyprus.

My grandfather had since died, but my grandmother was so pleased to see me, having kept photos of me as a baby which my mother had sent her. I did not speak any Greek, and she no English, but it was an emotional meeting. I could not speak either with my Uncle Costas or many other relations. I enjoyed seeing them gather the grape harvest, and even lent a hand while someone took a photo for my album.

The weather was very hot, but I think I only got three hours on the beach during my two week stay. Part of the time was spent in my dad’s flat in Nicosia. It was stifling hot; 97 degrees outside and well over 100 inside. I had to soak my pajamas in cold water several times a night in order to sleep and an hour later they were bone dry again.

I visited the Turkish part of Nicosia, but when in my dad’s flat on the Greek side I tried to watch Pat Coombes in a British TV show on Turkish TV and my father went mad. No-one ever watched the Turkish channel in the Greek part of Cyprus. For this reason my dad did not realize the other part of the island, about a mile away, was an hour ahead. I was able to report back on other things too, such as shop prices. My father was furious to learn that the Turkish lira had replaced the Cypriot pound, and even more irate when he discovered prices over there were much cheaper than on the Greek side.

I was very sympathetic to the plight of the Turkish-Cypriots before and after the Sampson coup to unite Cyprus with the then fascist Greece ruled by a military junta. I also believe there is strong circumstantial evidence that all the events of 1974 which led to the division of the island were part of a NATO plot between USA, UK, Greece and Turkey to rid the island of Makarios because he was considered too ‘pro-Soviet’ and might allow Soviet naval ships to dock in the island’s ports. He survived the coup, but very conveniently died of ‘a heart attack’ three years later, but safely dead is again praised as a national hero.

My father maintained the Turkish-Cypriots were prisoners behind the Nicosia version of the Berlin Wall, and that the Greek-Cypriots would welcome them with open arms, but that the Turkish soldiers shot them if they tried to escape. However, he could not explain why virtually the entire Turkish population of Cyprus, spread throughout the island before the coup and subsequent Turkish intervention (as were the Greek-Cypriots) somehow found themselves ‘imprisoned’ in the North. Of course the former Turkish quarters in all towns and cities on the Greek side told their own story – both populations had been ethnically cleansed and forced to flee to their respective zones. The Greek exodus in the North was forced by the invading Turkish army, but the Turkish exodus in the South came about because of the hostility of the local Greek-Cypriot population. The Turkish Cypriots fled for their lives directly to the North or first to the British Sovereign Bases, and then to North Cyprus.

The two communities have a lot in common, and an almost indistinguishable way of life. Religion, nationality and language divide them. The border has been opened to all Cypriots and foreigners in the first decade of the 21^st century, and a permanent solution will hopefully be found.

When not in Nicosia back in 1977, I stayed with friends of my father’s in his village near Paphos. I saw the house where he was born, where my aunt and uncle then lived. They had lived in London for years and my aunt was not at that time happy to be back in the primitive conditions of a Cypriot village.

‘In Kilburn, if I want a chicken for lunch I go to Sainsbury’s’, she told me, ‘but here I have to catch chicken first.’

Everything in the village was very picturesque and traditional. The workers went to the fields on donkeys, though they all had cars, fridges and TVs. Cyprus is a very fertile and rich country, and since everyone in the countryside seems to own their house and a sizeable portion of land, they live very cheaply from produce they grow themselves.

My father was moaning about how much money and land the Church has, and seemed to think they should use it to compensate people like him who had lost land in the North. In the village, however, he had donated a church hall to impress the villagers, despite being an atheist at heart.

During this trip I got to know my father better, and psychoanalyzed him. He seemed to have spent his life trying to make money in order to buy ‘friends’. I found it all rather sad, as he was basically a lonely man. Certainly his own family never saw much of his money – it was boys from the village who were sent to be educated in England, but my brother and I, his own sons, never got a penny from him towards our education. My mother had to struggle to send my brother to university, and I never even got the opportunity.

I was staying with friends and neighbors of my father in his village of Kallepia. My eyes lit up and my heart jumped when he introduced me to Andreas, a handsome 18 year old just out of the army (the Greek Cypriot National Guard). I was to share a bedroom with him. Alas, although I tried to tell Andreas I was gay and to get his interest by wanking like mad when I was in a single bed a few feet from his, he simply fell straight asleep every night, and there was no hanky panky at all, despite all the rumors about Greeks. George said the poor lad was probably deadbeat from working in the fields all day.

Certainly Cyprus is one of the most homophobic societies in the world. My dad said a neighbor in the village who decided he was gay was forced to marry a girl, and they now had a family and he was reportedly ‘cured’. Gay bars hardly exist at all, and if they do are strictly for tourists. Even on a visit in the mid 1990s with two gay friends we found the Cyprus gay scene one of the worst in Europe (and in 2009 it didn’t seem to have improved any).

In 1977 I did manage to have a bit of fun in Nicosia, but the gay scene was all very furtive, and the cruising ground around the city walls either closed or brightly lit at night on subsequent visits. A park a bit further away took over in the mid-1990s, but the gay men cruising were scared of their own shadows, and scuttled away at the slightest noise. Homosexuality was illegal in Cyprus, although they had to change this on paper at least in order to join the EU.

Gays are strongly disapproved of by the Church and the population generally, since it goes totally against Greek-Cypriot culture. In the countryside you cannot even get a home unless you marry. It comes with a wife as a dowry in an arranged marriage, and the top story is built first. The parents of either the husband or the wife move into the ground floor level when they get too old to live on their own. Everyone has to do this – marry, have children and look after their parents. No room in such a culture for gays unless they conform and then look for extra-marital gay encounters in the few sad cottages and cruising grounds on the island.

Although I had no luck with bedding Andreas, he and his family treated me well and showed me around the area. My father took me to a Greek-Cypriot wedding, saying it was a ‘cousin’ getting married. Without further explanation he pushed me through a door into the church, whilst he went through another entrance. I thought it was great as I had a splendid view of the ceremony from the side of the altar. Then a man turned round and said something to me in Greek.  Not understanding Greek, when I did not respond, he spoke in English to demand five Cypriot pounds. My dad had not warned me I was one of the many ‘best men’ and would be expected to contribute, but luckily I had some money on me.

We then followed the couple out of the church, through the village to their house. A mattress was brought out and placed in the street. ‘What next?’ I thought, fully expecting the couple to consummate their marriage then and there in full view of the village. In actual fact, as always with Greek-Cypriots, there was a mercenary motive, for half an hour later the mattress was covered in currency notes and checks, whereupon it was carried back in again.

My dad took me to the beach only once or twice during my entire stay. I was furious at being stuck in a scrapyard in Limassol (which has excellent beaches) sweltering in 100 degree heat one day while he went off ‘to do some business’. Of course, without transport I was trapped – there was no public transport from my dad’s village to the coast. I had to rely on Andreas or my dad to give me a lift. On a later visit my dad lent me his car, which made all the difference.

Whilst in Cyprus I wrote two letters to George, which he kept. They were chatty letters about the holiday. I wrote about meeting my grandmother for the first time: ‘It was so overwhelming emotionally I wanted to cry. The poor old woman kept hugging and kissing me and asking how my leg is now. She has a picture of me as a baby on her wall, and was in tears because she lost a picture of Mum and Philip. So I gave her two photos, one of Mum and one of me, Philip and Mum. She kept kissing Mum’s photo and saying ‘‘O Dorothea, Dorothea’‘ and she told Dad off for not bringing her with us. I told her I’d bring her, but she said she may be dead by then.’

This proved true, for the old lady died a few months after my visit, so she and my mother never met. The remark about my leg was prompted by letters sent to her by my mother when I was a baby, describing operations for a club-foot and the resulting complications.

I then related in my letters Dad’s version of their married life together and the reasons I was not taught Greek, and what led to the split. He blamed much of it on relatives on my mother’s side of the family. ‘Dad says he was driven to drinking and gambling, and says my mum was psychologically ill and a religious maniac.’ I seem to see his point in the letter, and go on to describe how my mother asked him to refuse to serve two women in his restaurant because they were wearing fur coats and she thought they must therefore be prostitutes. Since my mother owned a fur coat herself, my father’s version of this incident may not be strictly accurate, though George would have remarked: ‘We are all prostitutes – including a wife who gets her husband to buy her a fur coat.’

I wrote about how my maternal grandmother made my mother paranoid, and I know my mum now agrees that her mother did have undue influence over her. In the letter I reported my dad’s version when: ‘On one occasion he tried to teach me a few Greek words Mum went hysterical and screamed: ‘‘Don’t talk to him in that bloody language’‘.’ I also reported his claim never to have planned keeping my brother and me in Cyprus as children, but said: ‘I suppose I shall never know the whole truth, but certainly my dad was not solely to blame. I understand him much better now, and think we are much closer.’

This closeness did not last long, though I certainly think I got to understand him better. The main cause of the marriage breakdown was, of course, the culture clash. In rural Cyprus women are merely chattels and servants, and the men sit around all day and do little but sip coffee and play backgammon whilst the women work. My mother was not prepared for that kind of life, and my father could not understand why.

I wrote a little insight into why most Cypriot homes are modern, why everyone seems to own their house, and why even gays marry: ‘Most houses here are modern because every daughter is built a new home by her parents for when she marries. When old people die their house is pulled down.’

After describing enormous tomatoes and huge pork chops, I quoted my Dad reciting a Cypriot proverb: ‘If you find food eat, if you find work run away.’

As to my dad’s version of the marriage problems, I have now come to the conclusion he felt trapped, having made my mother pregnant before they were married and my mum’s brothers who were policemen (my maternal grandfather had also been a police sergeant) apparently came down heavy on him, telling him he had to marry her.

The culture clash didn’t help, and nor did his drinking, gambling, womanizing and beating my mother up when drunk. So clearly my father was largely to blame for the bad marriage and subsequent separation and divorce. It is perhaps best summed up in my father’s stated view of a wife’s role when my mother asked why they never went out together: ‘In Cyprus we have a saying: “women and dogs stay in the house”’. On another occasion she asked why he slept with prostitutes and waitresses from his restaurant: ‘Don’t you love me anymore?’ ‘Yes, of course I love you,’ my father replied. ‘I love baked beans, but I don’t want them every night!’ Being put on a par with dogs and baked beans does little for a marriage, or a woman’s esteem.

Christmas Day we spent at my mother’s place, then went down to Rose and Neil in Hastings on Boxing Day and stayed two nights.

We had a New Year’s Eve party, the last in our first home together. A lot of our friends came, including Freda in full glamorous theatrical drag. Just as we were in the middle of preparations on New Year’s Eve I got a phone call from my dad in Cyprus to say that Andreas, the boy from his village with whom I shared a bedroom in September, was on a flight to Heathrow, and could I meet him and take him to my father’s flat in Hampstead.

Typically of my dad this came straight out of the blue with no warning whatsoever, so after a hurried discussion with George, it was decided I would dash off in the van, meet Andreas and bring him back to the party, and take him to my father’s flat later that night or the next day.

I believe I greeted the first guests, and then drove to Heathrow to collect Andreas. The poor boy had never been abroad before, and certainly had never seen a big city like London. All he really knew was primitive village life in rural Cyprus. Imagine the culture shock on arrival at Heathrow and being driven down the motorway to a gay party in suburban London.

Andreas was bewildered at all these strange English people packed into our flat. Which were men and which were women? It was so hard to tell. He looked at Freda, and I explained it was a man dressed as a woman, then he looked at our actress friend Pat, and I assured him she was a real woman. He then looked back at Freda and queried: ‘Man dressed as woman?’

Of course all the gays at the party were just drooling over this gorgeous young Greek god who had just walked into their midst, and we had to keep explaining he was not gay (despite the myths about Greeks) and had just arrived from a village in Cyprus. I was probably the only out gay person he had ever met prior to leaving Cyprus, and he had certainly never seen a drag queen before.

He had a few drinks and seemed to be enjoying himself, but eventually it was all too much for him and he asked me to take him to my dad’s flat. So I had to leave the party and drive him across London. I forgot about it being the early hours of New Year’s Day, and drove up The Mall and through Trafalgar Square, where people were swarming all over the road wearing funny hats, blowing hooters, twirling football rattles, and banging on cars.

One guy staggered up to us and thumped on the van shouting: ‘Happy New Year.’ From the look on Andreas’ face he clearly thought all the English were stark raving mad, and must have wondered how he would survive in this strange new world where men dressed as women and people walked around all night in a drunken stupor making a noise and stopping traffic. My father’s empty flat in Hampstead must have seemed like a haven of sanity to him as I dropped him off, quickly showed him where everything was and dashed back to the party.

In early 1978 an acquaintance of George’s (I would not use the word friend) wanted us to move his few sticks of furniture from his West London room to his mother’s house in East Anglia, where he was going to live. George thought he was only after his mother’s house and money, and I have no reason to doubt his judgment. This person was very vain and talked non-stop about himself all the way down in my van. He used to go ‘on the game’ in drag, and he told us how he crossed himself every time he passed a Catholic church because God had been so good to him.

He said he would treat us to a meal for helping to move his stuff, and instructed us to stop at a hamburger joint with waitress service. He then humiliated the waitress, telling her he knew her big boss personally (it was a large chain) and realized how poorly his staff were paid, but not to worry as he would give her a big tip. I think he left her 10 pence.

We got to the town and met his mother, a frail old lady. We were horrified when he told her to go upstairs to bed. He had shown us her bedroom, and it was up a steep, dangerously winding staircase. George was convinced he hoped his mother would fall and break her neck. His praises of her were over-the-top – about how he thanked God every day for such a wonderful mother and hoped nothing happened to her. 

We lost touch with him eventually and thought he must have died. Long after George’s death he rang me out of the blue, looking for a place to live in London. His mother had died and evidently he had not inherited the house. I told him about George’s death, but he was not the least interested, though he had known George far longer than he knew me. Without offering condolences or inquiring what happened, he just said: ‘And I lost my dear mother, but I’m still as young and more beautiful than ever, darling. I really am, I look younger than ever.’

He inquired after a mutual friend, and I told him he was still at the same address. Months later I discovered he had moved into a room in the same house. The person who told me said that, far from looking younger than ever, he looked rather old, his hair having gone completely white. Later still he changed his name to ‘Gloria’ and his religion from Roman Catholic saying: ‘I’m a good Jewish girl now darling.’ He had evidently found himself a rich Jewish ‘husband’ or ‘client’!

The year 1978 was certainly to bring a big change, for in early March we were to leave our first home of our own together.

12. JAY COURT                       

 We had put our name on the council waiting list only the previous year, thinking we never stood a chance. In a very short space of time we were offered a lovely, centrally heated, two-bedroomed flat on the 18th floor of a tower block. We jumped at the opportunity.

There was a policy by the then Labour council in Wandsworth to get families with young children out of tower blocks, and move single people in. This was why we only had to wait about a year. A few months later a Tory council was elected, and the scheme was scrapped.

When I put our names on the council list, I had hoped to be able to get a flat in Camden, where I had been raised till the age of 6, returned to for 5 years in 1968, and where both my parents still lived (in separate flats). I soon learnt there was no chance; because we had landed in Battersea by accident, we were stuck there, even though we had no connexions at all with the area and most of our friends and family lived north of the River. The only chance of getting to another borough was by taking inferior council accommodation locals had rejected, or accepting a flat in Battersea and later getting an exchange. In actual fact, once we moved into Jay Court we did not really want to leave. We did apply for some Camden flats, but the ones we were offered came nowhere near the standard of our Battersea flat.

We had two cats, and since they were used to going out in our backyard, we thought it unfair to keep them in a high-rise flat without a balcony. So my mother had them both for a time, but eventually we took Dixie back, and he settled in OK. My mother kept Dinkie, our other cat.

During March we were busy getting our new flat straight, and having furniture and carpets delivered. Our previous flat had been partly furnished, so there was quite a lot to buy.

No sooner were we straight, than we were off to Brussels for Easter, which fell at the end of March that year.

We crossed the Channel by hovercraft on Good Friday, and had an enjoyable weekend, returning on the Monday. Brussels is not the most exciting of European cities, but we saw what there was to see, including the famous Mannequin de Pis (a fountain in the guise of a little boy pissing), which is tiny and quite hard to find. We also saw the various costumes the statue wears on special occasions.

We paid a visit to the Atomium, left over from a big international exhibition held in Brussels in the 1950s, a sort of equivalent to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. We went up inside the structure, but it has never become as famous or popular as the Paris tower.

There were some interesting Japanese and Chinese pagodas nearby, but we missed perhaps the most exciting architecture in Brussels, the buildings designed in art nouveau style by Victor Horta. His work in Brussels was apparently similar to Gaudi’s in Barcelona, but we had no knowledge of either architect at the time.

In June George’s two sisters came down to London to stay for a few days, and they were followed by George’s cousin, her husband and her mother at the end of July, who stayed for two weeks.
 

George was very fond of his Auntie Rose, whom he lived with for a while when his father died. His cousin, Margaret, and her husband were a wonderful couple, who could not do enough for people. Neither Margaret nor her mother were fond of cats, yet they soon got used to Dixie, our cat, and by the end of the fortnight Margaret was spoiling it thoroughly with tins of salmon bought from Marks and Spencer. It took us weeks to wean him back on to regular canned cat food.

We took them to Windsor, Richmond and Kew Gardens, and they also visited the usual tourist sights in London, including the Royal Mews. We all went down to Portsmouth for the day to see George’s Uncle Robert and his wife. This became a regular trip whenever George’s cousin came to London.

We took them all to see ‘The Two Ronnies’ at the London Palladium, They enjoyed the show, but Auntie Rose suffered from vertigo, a fact we didn’t know when we booked tickets up in the gods. For the first 15 minutes or so she was very nervous of looking steeply down at the stage at all.

Another mistake, according to Margaret’s husband John, was to take them to Brent Cross shopping center. Margaret and her mother were delighted with the shops, but John pretended to be horrified as they rushed round seeing where they could spend their (his) money.

‘Oh, this is the worst place you could have brought them,’ he joked. He liked his little dram and would no doubt rather spend his money in a pub, or rather a Trades and Labor club where the drinks were cheaper. His wife, however, strongly disapproved of drinking, but they joked about each other’s extravagances and seemed to get on very well. John was always in a good humor, and both were very generous.

For the August Bank Holiday weekend we went down to Somerset with my mother to stay with her friend in Porlock. My brother Philip turned up there with a friend in tow. Since Philip had never shown any interest in girls, and was now nearly 30, my mother expected another male potholing buddy, but to her delight and surprise it was a girl, Hilda. We met them on the beach by Porlock Weir, and Philip and I went in swimming, but when it was finally time for them to go, Hilda shook hands with everybody else but pointedly ignored George’s proffered hand. I did not notice this at the time, but George was understandably deeply hurt. This was the start of a long breach in relations with my brother. His wife hated my name so much she forbade it to be spoken in her house, and made this fact obvious to my mother. The only possible reason for this hatred could be that we were a gay couple.

Philip and Hilda came back to London with us, and for the one and only time actually came into our flat. I remember them standing holding hands looking out at the view from our 18th floor window.

In September we flew to Spain for a week of touring, and a second week by the sea in Lloret. It was the forerunner of many late September holidays we were to spend in Lloret, and as we always went that time of year it is pure chance we were not there at the time George died in 1991. We had broken the pattern and gone a week earlier to Jersey instead that fateful year.

In 1978 we flew out to Barcelona on Monday September 25th, and stayed overnight in an hotel just off The Ramblas. We did not have that long to explore the city, but I remember venturing out of our hotel that evening after we arrived and going across The Ramblas to wander the narrow streets of the Old Town and see what we took to be the old cathedral, but years after George died I discovered it was just a church, when I found the real old cathedral in a square.

Next day we were driven south to Valencia for sightseeing and an overnight stop, and the following day we moved on to the capital, Madrid. My first impression was how tall the buildings were. It seemed like an American city, with its canyon-like streets of buildings at least 9 stories tall. In the center of the city were much taller buildings, reminiscent of 1930s New York skyscrapers. There were also some impressive monuments and fountains, including a very modern waterfall fountain in a central square where it was possible to walk along a passage behind the waterfall – very cooling on a hot day in this city in the center of sunny Spain. We also visited the famous Prado art gallery and saw its paintings by Heronius Bosch and others.

Our hotel was on the outskirts of the city, a very pleasant little hotel with a half-timbered dining room, reminiscent of an English inn.

Whilst in Madrid, we visited the ancient city of Toledo nearby, and witnessed a religious procession for one of the Spanish festival days. Toledo was impressive, with its huge castle on a hill towering over the town and the Spanish plain.

En route to Madrid we had made a stop at Old Medinaceli, another interesting town, and en route from Madrid to our overnight stop in Lerida we visited the city of Saragossa.

On Sunday October 1st we arrived in the tiny principality of Andorra, the Catalan statelet sandwiched between Spain and France. It is a mountainous little country in The Pyrenees, and is basically two small towns arranged along two valleys, joining in a ‘V’ shape. The principal town is Andorra La Vella, which consists mainly of hotels and duty-free shops where you see French and Spanish people loading up their cars with TV sets, hi-fi equipment, etc.. We spent one night in an hotel here, and had a drive up into the mountains almost to the French border. There was snow up there, and we just briefly emerged from the coach for a photo, but without winter coats it was too cold to linger.

Then it was on to Lloret de Mar for our second week, relaxing by the sea. The town quite impressed us because, although a very commercialized tourist center, the main resort for the then popular Costa Brava, it was a genuine old Catalonian town with some beautiful buildings and narrow streets. Unlike artificial places such as Magaluf in Majorca, which we had visited previously, and which were created solely for tourists, consisting of huge tower block hotels and holiday apartments. Lloret only had one tall building, and boasted a Ramblas lined with palm trees and some interesting old buildings, a very colorful little domed church and the inevitable castle overlooking the sea. It also had an excellent beach of coarse sand, though the sea shelved rather steeply and deeply for non-swimmers.
 

At night Lloret came to life, its narrow shopping streets a blaze of neon with discos, bars and shops. The main modern street leading down to the sea from the bus station had a canal running down the center. At least in winter it was probably a canal, as the rains drained from the inland hills down into the sea. In summer it was a large, dry, cemented, excavation with a pathetic trickle of water winding its way down the center.

We also made a visit to the nearby resort of Tossa de Mar, which is smaller and quieter than Lloret, but also boasts a castle on a hill overlooking the sea.

On the Friday before returning we went to nearby Blanes and caught a train along the coast into Barcelona, as we had only spent one evening there at the beginning of our holiday. Here we discovered what was to become one of our favorite cities in the world, largely due to the fantastic art nouveau architecture of Antonio Gaudi.

We were very impressed by his still unfinished (in fact hardly started when you look at the plans for the finished building which will be massive) Sagrada Familia. This is an art nouveau church (more like a cathedral), started about 100 years ago. The original Nativity Facade is the most interesting since it was built largely whilst Gaudi was still alive. Run over by a tram, work on his Sagrada Familia virtually stopped during the Franco years, and was only continued after the downfall of the dictator who disapproved of this unorthodox Catalan architect. The newer facade follows Gaudi’s overall design, but incorporates many modern sculptures not in Gaudi’s art nouveau style.

We also discovered some of Gaudi’s other buildings, including the really unbelievable Casa Battlo, with its dragon’s back roof and cave-like windows, and the larger Casa Mila, occupying a corner site further up the road. On later visits to Barcelona we were to venture inside these fantastic buildings, and even get on the roof of the Casa Mila.

On this first full day in Barcelona we also discovered the Guell Park with its fairy-tale pavilions, walls, sculptures, staircase, terrace and tunnels, all in Gaudi’s art nouveau style. There was also some wonderful art nouveau iron-work in the form of gates and fences. We were so impressed by Gaudi’s work, not least this delightful little park, we were distressed to see children playing on the terrace with its winding, snake-like seats, because they were ruining its colorful mosaics. On a later visit to the park one year to the day after George’s death I was pleased to see these seats were being restored to their original condition, and at the hour of George’s death a year later I left a tiny sprig of flowers in one of the art nouveau tunnels we had first discovered on this trip in October 1978. The park was one of George’s favorite places on this Earth.

Whilst staying in Lloret, we also visited nearby Blanes, but were not impressed with this rather dull town. However we ran into two cockney brothers from our hotel whilst passing a bar on the sea front, and they urged us to go in and join them in a drink.

‘C’mon, ‘s’cheap, ‘s’luvly’ one of the middle-aged brothers slurred.

He was chatting away about the delights of cheap beer, to the obvious annoyance of local Catalans watching on TV the somber funeral of The Pope, who had died a few days previously. They kept giving us withering glances, and when we pointed this out to our cockney friend and signaled him to speak more softly, he just looked round at the TV and said untactfully:

‘Oh they’re just burying some old Pope, don’t worry ‘bout that mate. Drink up, ‘scheap, ‘s’luvly’.

After two more days in Lloret, we flew back to London on the Monday. The two cockney brothers were in a high state of intoxication at the airport as they tried to consume as much duty-free booze as possible before the flight. They were still exclaiming ‘drink up, ‘s’cheap, ‘s’luvly’, and most of the other passengers seemed to agree, as they were either drinking or smoking duty-free goods, or both. This was the typical Costa Brava tourist at the time, attracted by cheap booze, sun, sea and sand (with possibly a bit of sex as well if they were lucky and drunk enough.)

We had done our own thing, however, and avoided the bars and places where the lager louts hung out, discovering the more interesting delights of Catalonia, as well as enjoying the beaches. We were to return many times, but not for a few years yet.

Coming up at the end of the year was my brother Philip’s wedding, but his bride-to-be, Hilda, had stipulated George was not welcome. This message was conveyed through my mother, and the excuse was it was a ‘family only’ affair. It so happened George and I had arranged to go to Scotland for the New Year, and we had planned to stop off in Settle for the wedding, but after this shocking news, the first firm evidence of Hilda’s raging homophobia, we both decided to skip their wedding and go straight to Glasgow.

I was visiting my father in his London flat a few weeks prior to the wedding, and when he heard I was not attending he was furious. I explained the reason why, and he fairly exploded. He got on the phone straight away to Philip and told him in no uncertain terms that his brother was coming to his wedding and would bring whoever he liked. Philip and Hilda, being very aware of my father’s money, did not dare upset him, and meekly agreed to his demand. To save a further family row, George and I agreed to stop off at Settle for a few hours for the wedding on the way up to Scotland, but we were not happy about it, and there was a strained atmosphere throughout our visit.

Hilda’s relations were quite amiable – her brother was nice, and a butch female relative was obviously gay, and very friendly towards us. Hilda and Philip were very distant, and accepted our wedding gift as grudgingly as we gave it. My mother gave them a dinner service she could ill afford, and told Hilda it was complete apart from some vegetable dishes which were extra to the set, and Hilda turned round and said:

‘Oh, we’d like the vegetable dishes as well, please’.

So my mother, an old age pensioner, had to go home and order the vegetable dishes to add to their wedding gift.

When they were about to cut the two-tier wedding cake, my mother said it was tradition to save the top tier for the first baby’s christening. She was obviously thrilled at the prospect of one day being a grandmother. Her dreams were quickly shattered by Hilda who remarked sharply: ‘There’ll be none of THAT nonsense!’ We have never been able to work out ever since whether ‘THAT nonsense’ referred just to kids, or to all sexual relations.

 As we came out of my father’s car on the way to the reception, he had  handed Hilda gold watch, and she was positively fawning over my dad.
 

The whole thing made us sick, and we could hardly wait to board the Settle-Carlisle railway to complete our journey to Glasgow that night. Everyone told us what fools we were to miss the most picturesque railway ride in England by traveling at night and I’ve regretted  this stupid decision ever since, but we were just pleased to leave and head for the welcome of a Scottish Hogmanay.

We left Settle at 7pm, and arrived in Glasgow 10pm that night. Next day was New Year’s Eve, when the festivities began. It was another enjoyable Hogmanay spent in Glasgow with George’s relations, who all made me feel welcome and one of the family. Such a change after the hostility of my brother and his wife.

We returned from Glasgow on January 4th and a relatively quiet few months followed.

It may have been a very unlucky day to choose, but April the 13th was Good Friday, and we were off to spend Easter in Paris. It was very good weather, and we visited all the usual sights on Saturday (Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysees, Notre Dame) and spent Easter Day in Pere Lachaise cemetery visiting the famous (and the infamous) in their final resting place, and the remainder of the day we spent around Sacre Coeur in the Montmarte area.

On this occasion we had not booked a room in advance, so looked for an hotel when we arrived. We found one, but the only room available was a sort of hut on the roof. Inside it was a proper room, very basic and a bit sordid, but full of the Paris atmosphere we loved so much. It was a marvelous weekend, with the weather so warm it was almost like summer.

Saturday June 30th was the day of the annual Gay Pride festival in London, and George went along, but Mum and I were off to Glasgow to stay with George’s cousin, visiting Philip and Hilda in the English Lake District on the way back. For some reason George could not come with us. Although we both worked in the same office, we usually managed to get holidays off together. Perhaps this was one time we couldn’t, or perhaps the visit to Philip and Hilda put him off.

George’s cousin and her husband made us very welcome, and she took us on the local train to Loch Lomond. We had a boat ride on the loch, and a coach trip right round it. I also took my mother to Helensburgh, and to visit at least one of George’s sisters.

The stony cold reception which greeted us at Philip and Hilda’s house was such a contrast to the warm hospitality of Margaret and John in Scotland, who were not even related to us. My brother and his wife just acted as if my mother and I did not exist. They sat all evening hardly talking to us, Hilda looking at school books (she was a schoolteacher who hated kids) and Philip reading, while the TV was tuned inaudibly to boring programs nobody was watching. They did not attempt to make conversation with us, or ask what we would like to see on TV. If we tried to talk we just got sharp, one syllable answers which clearly told us to shut up.
 

We felt most uncomfortable, especially as every now and then she and Philip would bend their heads close together and start whispering confidences to each other. At one point during our stay my mother was telling Hilda something and she just got up and walked out of the room.

Philip used to share my tastes in music, but his Country and Rock’n’Roll record collection, including a lot of Jerry Lee Lewis albums, seemed to have been relegated by Hilda to the back shelf in favor of classical albums. Certainly I never heard him play any of the music he used to like either at home or in the car.

My mother and I visited Ullswater by bus and spent a pleasant day, and on the day we were returning home Philip drove us to Hilda’s parents by the scenic route. I had brought some Glasgow goodies for George (potato scones, black pudding, lorn sausage, etc.) and Hilda had put it in her fridge to keep it fresh. Quite deliberately she insured it remained in her fridge. I am convinced she planned it all beforehand.

We were sitting in their lounge, when suddenly Hilda popped her head in the door without any warning and said: ‘Come on, we’re off’.

She had her coat on, and Philip was already in the car, having loaded our cases. So we just had to grab our coats and run. When we were safely miles away on the Yorkshire Moors, Hilda turned round to me in the car, smiling sweetly, and said sarcastically: ‘And did you remember to take George’s things out of the fridge?’ Of course she knew full well she had not given me a chance to remember. Philip offered to go back for them, but she said: ‘Oh no you will not!’

She later insured he did not go back afterwards either. She had an appointment at the hairdresser’s near her parents’ place, but canceled it so she could come in the car with us to make sure Philip did not go back for George’s things. It was all incredibly petty, but it created further very bad feeling after the business over the wedding and not shaking hands with George the first time we met Hilda.

At her parents’ house they served up strawberries for dessert, and there was some trouble because Hilda did or did not want cream or sugar, I cannot remember the details. I know Philip snatched away her dish and like a dutiful husband tried to put things right, but Hilda went into a sulk and said: ‘No, I don’t want them now’, and refused to eat them at all.

It was all so childish, and when I got home and related the story to George he remarked that Hilda had acted like a spoiled child. He urged me to write a letter to Philip, saying it was my duty as a brother to make sure he treated my mother properly, and that he appreciated all she had done for him. Hilda and Philip kept on very good terms with my father, who had money, and Hilda valued Philip’s university education, but my father had not paid a penny towards it. My mother had to sacrifice the little money earned from her job to help keep Philip at university, and look after him in the holidays.

I wrote a letter and tried to tactfully remind him of this and other things Mum had done for him. I thanked him for all he had done for us during our visit, but also pointed out we felt uncomfortable particularly when they both had their noses in books and kept whispering to each other, which I said was very impolite in company. Perhaps unwisely, with George’s encouragement, I remarked that Hilda had acted like a spoilt child.

Of course Hilda read this letter, though it was not addressed to her, and it was the excuse she had been looking for. She made Philip cut all ties with me, and decreed my name was never to be mentioned in her house again. From that day till our father got terminally ill in 1998, Philip never contacted me or sent me a Christmas card, and all communications to him from me went unanswered. In 1995 Philip made the one exception in breaking all contact by phoning me obviously to make sure I was not visiting my dad, who was in London for a few days, on the same day as Philip and Hilda. This happened once before when my dad was staying with some relations on his annual UK visit. I knew Philip and Hilda would be there and wondered if I should go, but George insisted I did and that I get there before they arrived. They were forced to talk to me, and seemed to act as if nothing had happened. But afterwards I got the cold shoulder again. Philip’s phone call that time was to make sure there was not a repeat performance when Hilda would have to tolerate my presence.

My mother went up to their house after George died and mentioned my name a few times. When she did so to Philip, his eyes began filling with tears and he rushed upstairs. When she mentioned my name to Hilda she glared at her with such a look of hatred my mother was taken aback. She told me she had never seen a look of such utter evil in anyone’s face before. However, when I met them in Cyprus for my father’s funeral in 1998, she had mellowed, and even became quite friendly towards me after the initial ice was broken. Is it cynical to wonder if my being a potential fellow inheritor of my father’s wealth whose cooperation was needed for any legal formalities had anything to do with it? Certainly they needed my cooperation to contest the Will which they were not satisfied with, but perhaps Hilda had just become more mature in her attitude towards me over the years.

At the end of September George and I were off on the big trip, our first transatlantic venture to the States. The air flight to New York was a nightmare. When we boarded the PanAm jumbo we discovered someone was sitting in one of our seats. A stewardess came along, and told us there was no time to sort the problem out now as the plane was about to taxi ready for take off. She told me to sit down in the available seat, and whisked George off to the first class section. That was the last I saw of him for the entire eight hour flight. Of course the plane should never have taken off at all with seats double-booked, which meant there were not enough for all the passengers.

During the flight I asked if I could join George, and the stewardess refused, saying I could not even go and talk to him as I was not allowed into first class. I found out he was seated upstairs in the first class dining section, without any company or films to watch. I then asked the stewardess if we could at least change places for a few hours, so George could come down and watch a film, but she refused this request too.

I later learned from George that not only had he been stuck alone for many hours (apart from the odd crew member who would come in from time to time) without any film, audio entertainment or anyone to talk to, but when the first class passengers came up for their meal he was treated like an outcast. When he saw rare roast beef (his favorite meat) being carved from the joint, he thought at least he had this consolation, and was astounded and dejected when they brought him a regulation economy class meal on a plastic tray. Not only was it mental torture whilst everyone around him was tucking into roast beef, but it was extremely humiliating, as the first class passengers kept glaring at this second-class intruder eating his economy meal in their midst, making it plain they felt he had no right to be there.

When we finally reached New York and met up in JFK airport, George was in a terrible state and wanted to catch the next plane back home. The final insult was when he complained, and the stewardess told him he had nothing to complain about as he had been treated as a first class passenger. Of course we later wrote and got some cash compensation, but it was a dreadful start to the holiday.

Of course, we did not turn back. We joined the long line for U.S. Customs and Immigration, and the final straw for George was when he was accused of not declaring a banana (it was left uneaten during the unhappy flight), and it was promptly confiscated with a warning it was a serious offense to try to smuggle a banana into the Big Apple (or more precisely, into the U.S.).

However, once we left JFK airport, we instantly fell in love with New York. The sheer excitement of approaching Manhattan with its dramatic skyline soon made us forget the traumas of the journey out. We were ready to begin the first of our great American adventures.

We arrived in the evening, and then had two full days in New York. During that time we did all the sights, visiting the Statue of Liberty by boat, going up the Empire State Building and World Trade Center, visiting Chinatown, Times Square and Central Park. We discovered lesser known delights such as the Flat-iron Building, so named because of its shape, and reportedly the world’s first skyscraper.

On this and subsequent visits to the Big Apple we enjoyed the culinary delights of New York such as the huge beef sandwiches which were a meal in themselves, and the Blarney Stone chain of licensed restaurants which not only served these sandwiches, but had a bar down one side, and a self-service food counter down the other where they carved huge portions of meat from the joint and topped it off with vegetables. We also discovered strange exotic drinks like Orange Juliuses, which actually came in several flavors.

New York seemed to have everything in abundance, and not just delicious food. The gay sex scene was as free as in Amsterdam, but all the establishments here were bigger and better. We visited the enormous Adonis cinema, which also had a bar and a disco dance floor attached if I remember rightly, and numerous backrooms including one behind the cinema screen, where you watched the porno film back-to-front. There were other gay clubs on several levels with very spacious, exotic backrooms, and most of these establishments gave you tickets so you could wander in and out of several all night long. It all seemed so civilized compared to Nanny-State Britain at the time.

Of course unknown to anybody, HIV was then becoming rampant in places like New York. I found a hotel check in George’s 1979 diary, and he wrote to a friend that he took a sailor back to his hotel. I believe, if George did come into contact with the virus in New York, it was probably when he went back to an hotel with this guy or somebody else. I was at least as active on the New York backroom scene as George was, yet do not ever remember practising what we now know to be unsafe (unprotected anal) sex in any of them. The reason it was so dangerous visiting New York at that particular time was that the HIV/AIDS epidemic was already spreading there like wildfire, yet no-one knew about it or what precautions to take.

We were staying in an hotel near Washington Square called the Gramercy Park, after the area where the hotel was located. The Square itself was an oasis of parkland with a fountain at the center, and was a hive of activity day and night. Skateboarders and drug pedlars were everywhere, and the New York Police Department seemed at the time to take almost as liberal an attitude over cannabis as the Amsterdam police did. At any rate it seemed to be on sale quite openly, especially in Washington Square judging by all the dealers inviting the passing public to ‘check it out’, referring to their wares.

We rode the Subway down to the Battery, and ventured Uptown as far as Harlem. I think the city cast its spell on both of us. Certainly I felt this was the only place to be on Earth. It was like coming home to where I belonged. It seemed everyone belonged in New York, a huge cosmopolitan city where all races and nationalities mingled. It is the melting pot of the world, and I felt proud to be a New Yorker even for only a few days. It may well have been on this occasion the Pope visited New York whilst we were there, and we caught a brief glimpse of the ‘Pope-mobile’ as he drove past. Whilst waiting for it a woman remarked that the top of the Empire State was still covered in mist, evidently a New Yorker’s way of judging the weather, and I felt privileged to be part of it all.

New York is full of the kind of real odd-ball characters who disappeared from London streets years ago. The people are friendly – you only have to open a map and they gather round to show you the way. Transport is very inexpensive, as is everything except the theater, though nowadays London seat prices have more or less caught up.

We arrived in New York Monday evening, and on Thursday we were off by bus (coach) to Newport, Rhode Island. On the way we stopped off at Mystic Village in Connecticut, a delightful but artificial looking place. Newport had a very English-looking church, where John F. Kennedy was married. The harbor and some of the other buildings had a very English feel about them too, but of course we were in New England.

That evening we drove to Cape Cod for our overnight stay, but all we saw of it was a typical American ‘strip’: a highway lined with fast-food outlets, blazing neon and huge signs on high poles. We were advised to eat in the restaurant of the hotel, but we decided to find a place by ourselves and risked life and limb by trying to walk down the strip, which of course had no sidewalks. I think we reached Wendy’s hamburger joint, which had waitress service. All we wanted was the kind of place where you went up to a counter to get served. So we decided we might as well go back to the hotel restaurant, and we were so glad we did. As we sat down at our table the waitress introduced herself:

‘Hi, I’m Millie and I’m your waitress for tonight….’. She showed us the menu, and we decided on roast beef. Instead of a thin sliver of meat, we were amazed when we were each served with the equivalent of the British weekly joint, either of which would have fed an English family of four for several meals. We remarked on this fact to Millie, who shook her head in sad disbelief that the English should be so starved as to make one meal go so far. The bill, when it came, was extremely reasonable, and we were pleased we did not chomp into a hamburger at Wendy’s, delicious as they may well have been.

Friday we stopped of at Plymouth, Massachusetts where the Pilgrim Fathers landed. We saw Plymouth Rock, a statue to the original Americans (a Native American) and a replica of the Mayflower.

We stopped for about an hour in Boston, but did not see as much of it as we might because my watch had broken, and we spent most of the time looking for somewhere to get it fixed. We walked through a big market arcade, and eventually found a department store where they mended my watch free of charge. That is American service for you.

We then drove across the river to the other half of the city, known as Cambridge. Here we visited the campus of the famous Harvard University, which also looked very English indeed.

Saturday we drove to Camden, Maine where we stopped for about an hour. During that time I was accosted by a woman on the waterfront who invited me back to her place for ‘a party’. Evidently she thought I looked like a ‘swinger’, but I had to feebly make my apologies by explaining I was just a tourist who had to be back on his bus within the hour.

We drove through the beautiful New England countryside with its brilliant fall colors, and crossed the border into Quebec. Eventually we reached Quebec City, where we were staying for a couple of nights. It is probably the most European city in North America, and the location for many North American films when they want a European setting without the expense of a transatlantic trip. It actually has walls round it and turreted gates, and inside are narrow streets which could easily be taken for Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris or almost anywhere else in Europe. There are also impressive French-style chateaus and towers with pointed green roofs. We loved the city because it seemed so different and out of place in North America. The language, of course, is French, but a peculiar kind hard to understand if you are used to the European dialects. George spoke French quite well, but found it very difficult to understand the Quebec variety.

Next we drove on to Montreal, and stayed in a large room with our own cooking facilities. We bought some bacon and eggs and George cooked us a meal. I have a photo of him cooking over the gas stove, with the open fridge full of cans, and another photo shows me at our own dining table eating the meal he cooked. In yet another corner of the huge room or suite was a large sofa and armchair and a color TV. Of course by now we had discovered the multi-channel entertainment on offer in North America, with an endless choice of programs old and new.

Whilst in Montreal we went to the cinema and saw ‘Apocalypse Now’, a film George appreciated more than myself. I think I found it just too heavy, and a bit above my head.

As we left the city in the bus, bound for English-speaking Canada and the capital, Ottawa, Montreal was receiving one of its first falls of snow that winter, and on October 9th the ground was already carpeted with a thin covering of white.

Ottawa, like Quebec City, had some interesting European-looking buildings, especially the neo-Gothic spires of the Parliament Building. We arrived on the day of the opening of Parliament, and were privileged enough to see the new Prime Minister, Joe Clark, and his wife go past in a horse-driven open carriage, escorted by the Mounties in their scarlet uniforms.

Next day we were due to move on to Toronto for two nights, but George had arranged with his cousin, Sally, for her to meet the bus en route so we could spend the night at her place in Peterboro’, a town some miles from Toronto. We stopped at Kingston, Ontario for a short break, and viewed a Mississippi-style paddle-steamer and an old Canadian Pacific steam engine which were on display, and then George phoned Sally to give her an idea what time to intercept the bus.

As we drove the final lap to Toronto, Sally and her husband Bill met us in their car by a road junction, and the coach stopped and let us off with our luggage. Sally and Bill drove us back to their house, where we briefly met their adolescent sons. It so happened my own cousin also lived in Peterboro’ at the time, so we gave him a ring and he popped over to collect us. We met his wife, Tina, and their two young children, and had a pleasant chat. Tina was a Mormon, but apparently my cousin Bruce was not.

Time was drawing on and we felt trapped there, with no means of escape. George was getting very agitated, since we had really stopped off in Peterboro’ to see Sally and Bill, and it was they who were putting us up for the night and had made all the arrangements to meet the bus. Finally Bruce gave us a lift back, and we had a late night chat with Sally and Bill before going to bed.

During our 24 hours or so with Sally and Bill they showed us all round their big, suburban house, which was typical of many Canadian town houses and included a veranda and a large basement. They also took us round Peterboro’, accompanied by their little dog. We saw the famous elevator lock on one of Peterboro’s waterways.

Finally they drove us to Toronto, showed us one of the huge new shopping malls, and then left us at our hotel. We then did a quick city tour of Toronto, which included a ride up the world’s tallest free-standing structure, the CN Tower, with its dizzying view from the top (you looked down and felt the whole thing was going to topple over at the next gust of wind). Here we had our portrait done by computer-photo, then a fairly new phenomenon. We took the portrait home with us and put it up for a time in the Telex room where we both worked. Computer pictures are made up of letters and other characters to form a photograph, and we kidded everyone who asked about it that we had produced the picture on our telex machine. Most of them fell for it, because we often did receive computer-originated graphics over the telex line, especially at Christmas when transmission of images like Santa Claus and his reindeer blocked our lines for ages. We sometimes ran up our own telex bill by recording these images on telex Murray-code tape, and re-transmitting them on to our Australian correspondents as a Christmas greeting.

That evening in Toronto we went to see a new film, ‘The Amityville Horror’. Next morning we were off for Niagara Falls and the U.S. border. All the main attractions were on the Canadian side, where we were staying overnight, and this side also gives the best view of the Falls

We had our photos taken by the very dramatic Horseshoe Falls, then had a ride on the ‘Maid of the Mists’ pleasure boat to near the foot of the Falls. Everyone had to cover up from head to toe in black plastic macintoshes with hoods, so only the face was showing, otherwise our clothes would have been soaked through with the spray from the Falls.

On the way down through New England from Niagara to Washington D.C., we stopped overnight at a place called Scranton, Pennsylvania. In the motel room we found a little envelope with a printed note from our maid, hoping we would enjoy our stay and if we did could we leave a token of our appreciation in the envelope before we left. Now to us this was like a red rag to two raging bulls: it hit two sore points in one go. We hated tipping, and maids were just a bloody nuisance. We didn’t have maids at home in our flat, so why should we be pestered with them on our holidays? We were quite happy to use the same towels all week, pull the bedclothes together and put up with a bit of dust, but they insisted on knocking at our door at some unearthly hour in the morning when we wanted a lie in, even when we managed to find and display a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign sometimes. If it was wet weather, you felt obliged to vacate your room just so the maid could get in and clean it. We never cleaned our flat every day, but when on holiday and you felt like a lie in you couldn’t do it because of these armies of maids who seemed to be employed solely to annoy us. Now this one in Scranton had added insult to injury by not only demanding to be tipped for being a nuisance, but she had actually had the audacity to leave an envelope to put it in.

Well she certainly got a tip, but not the kind she hoped for. As far as I remember the note we left in the envelope for her read something like this: ‘Get back to your Scranton scrag-hole you mercenary maid’. The Scranton alliteration was no doubt lost on our transatlantic pest, since ‘Get back to your scrag-’ole’ was a phrase we had adopted from that marvelous British comedy actress, Patricia Hayes, in the TV play ‘Edna, The Inebriate Woman’. Of course we were off the next morning, but as we sat on the bus we imagined the greedy maid tearing open her envelope for some dollar bills, only to find this insulting note. We felt we had gotten our own back on all those maids intent on spoiling our past and future holidays by insisting on doing their silly job every morning. At the very least maids should not start work till 12 noon to give people a chance for a lie in, but one clean-up before we arrived, and once after we left would have been quite sufficient.

We were now bound for Washington, D.C. by way of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the peace treaty ending the American Civil War (or War between the States/War of Northern Aggression as it is referred to in the South) was signed. I took a photo of General Robert E. Lee’s headquarters which had the rebel Confederate flag flying outside.

We arrived for our two nights in the U.S. capital city in time for a big gay march, which we joined in, going right by the White House. Whilst in Washington we visited the other sights including the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol Building. We were taken on a tour and saw the Senate and House of Representatives. We also went across the river to Arlington, Virginia (in fact a suburb of Washington) to see John F. Kennedy’s grave in the huge military cemetery.

Whilst in Washington we had arranged to make our way to nearby Baltimore where my penfriend lived. I had been writing Dee Snoble for 15 years, but we had never met. We were both interested in 1950s rock’n’roll, and she was once a personal friend of our mutual idol, Jerry Lee Lewis who frequently passed through her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. We met up in the bus station, and she looked quite different to how I imagined. We had a lot to catch up on, and she showed us Baltimore Harbor, then took us to her house and introduced us to her pet cockatiel. She was very surprised when it took to George immediately, but then he seemed to have an affinity with all animals.

Dee’s house was rather weird in that owls in all forms, shapes and sizes were very much in evidence. A huge stuffed owl high in one corner dominated the room, and seemed likely to swoop down on us at any minute. Owl pictures and ornaments filled every available space on the walls and shelves in the main room, giving it a very eerie feel.
 

I had brought Dee an album of Newcastle-born Jerry Lee-style pianist and singer, Freddie ‘Fingers’ Lee as a present. I wore my American Eagle string tie for our first meeting, but regretted having abandoned my usual 1950s hairstyle for this American trip. I was rather relieved to find Dee looked very ordinary too, and certainly did not have a 1950s hairdo herself. The reason I didn’t recognize her when we met was my mental picture of her was composed from caricatures of herself she had drawn in our early correspondence, which used to be very wild, both of us doing drawings so the letters were more like comics. Dee depicted herself as a sort of short Brenda Lee type with a huge beehive hairdo, when I met her I was mildly surprised to find she was of normal height with a contemporary hairstyle, and, like myself, wearing spectacles.

When we met some of Dee’s friends on a subsequent visit it became pretty plain she kept her love of 1950s music and Jerry Lee Lewis very much to herself. I mentioned his name as George and I were eating out at a seafood restaurant with Dee and her friends, and they exclaimed in shocked amazement: ‘Jerry Lee Lewis? You’re not a fan of HIS, are you?’

This was in a tone of voice that implied Dee must be 100 years old, and possibly a little perverted for liking someone with such a colorful personal life. Dee was obviously a little embarrassed for she squirmed and then admitted that she had gotten to know me through the various 1950s rock’n’roll fan club magazines.
 

After our visit with Dee on this first of our American trips, we made our way back to Washington, and next day we were returning to New York for the flight home. En route we stopped off in Philadelphia long enough to see the main sights of that city, including the cracked Liberty Bell. This reminded me of a very similar bell I had seen before I met George in the Kremlin. The Russian bell did not just have a crack, but a large triangular-shaped chunk broken off. (George, in his witty way, had later written on the back of a photo of the Statue of Liberty which we took on one of our American trips, the caption: ‘The Liberty Belle’).

We arrived at JFK airport and flew back to London without further incident. This time we had seats together, and could enjoy the movies and other in flight entertainment. This may have been the time ‘The Muppet Movie’ was being shown during the flight, and George kept dozing off. He was seated between me and a woman passenger, and every now and then George kept half waking up, looking bleary eyed at the screen and, seeing the green figure of Kermit, kept exclaiming grumpily: ‘That bloody frog’ before drifting back to sleep again

In December we saw a very funny French/Italian film called ‘La Cage Aux Follies’ featuring two gay men in a lifelong partnership. Of course, this film achieved cult status, spurned many inferior sequels and was eventually made into a musical whose initial success was thwarted by the AIDS crisis, which temporarily made a musical with a homosexual theme very risky box office. Happily there are annual revivals of the musical, which has some excellent songs and a very funny but also moving story line. An American version of the film has since been made, called ‘Birds Of A Feather’, but I don’t think you can beat the French original.
 

In the latter half of 1979 I had applied for a telex job at Amnesty International, in response to a newspaper advert. At the interview I explained I wanted to work similar hours to my current job, which was effectively part-time. George and I used to do alternate shifts at an Australian company, one of us doing mornings and one afternoons, and we changed over every week. Amnesty International were looking for a full-time employee, but they agreed on a trial basis to offer both of us the job on a part-time basis. Whoever was on early shift at the Australian company would go over to Amnesty International in the afternoons and do that job also. At Christmas time we were in a quandary as both the Australian firm and Amnesty International had their staff Christmas parties on the same evening. I cannot remember now which one we went to.

As usual when we were in London on New Year’s Eve we had a party at our flat to finish the year off and see in the new one. In mid January 1980 George decided to leave the Australian firm we both worked for in order to take up a full-time post with Amnesty International. Two things had prompted this rather sudden move.

The Australian firm wanted to change some procedures, and George was not happy with this and gave in his notice almost on the spur of the moment. At the same time Amnesty international had decided they really did need someone to cover the mornings and were therefore going to advertise the telex position as a full-time one. George decided to take the Amnesty job.

Although it eventually turned sour on him, his time at AI was a rewarding and self-developing experience. He lost his paranoia about anything vaguely left-wing, and thoroughly enjoyed mixing with people who shared his tastes in theater and the arts. It was in the Telex Room at Amnesty international that he first created his famous collages, one of which was later to be featured on TV. 

A very sad event occurred on January 20th when George’s much loved Aunty Rose died, She was almost like a mother to him, since he had gone to live with her after both his parents had died. George went up to Glasgow on his own for the funeral.

On March 22nd we had a day trip to Chester, which we instantly fell in love with. Its Tudor-style streets with their unique two-level shopping arcades, all dominated by a pedestrian bridge with a famous clock, gave the city a special appeal. The bridge actually forms part of a walk which takes you all round the old city wall, from which you can view some Roman remains at one point. We visited the city on at least one other occasion, and even bought a picture-clock which represented the one in the middle of Chester. It still hangs in my hallway, but unfortunately I have never been able to get it to keep to the correct time, so have now removed the batteries.

In late June we were off again to the States. George has written in his diary the date we flew off: ‘USA. Heathrow-New York. Chapter Two.’ This was the big one – we visited New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Hawaii and San Francisco in a 19 day holiday we would always remember.

We left home on a Sunday and spent the first three nights in New York. Our three visits in as many years to The Big Apple now merge into one in my memory, but on this occasion photos prove we re-visited some of the main sights and some new ones to us, such as Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park. We spent some time walking around Greenwich Village and the Gay Street area. This may have been the visit where we narrowly missed being killed or seriously injured by a window-cleaners’ heavy wooden platform which came crashing down several stories on to the sidewalk, just missing both of us, in the SoHo district as we were walking either to or from the Village.

We re-visited Washington Square, and also made a trip by subway to Coney Island, where we spent some time on the beach and I swam in the Atlantic. A week later I was swimming in the Pacific in Hawaii, where the water was far warmer. Whilst in New York we also saw the film ‘The Shining’.

On the Thursday we flew to Las Vegas via Los Angeles. We somehow lost our courier at L.A. airport and instead of going through the transfer lounge ended up outside the airport terminal in front of the famous Air Travel sculpture. After a few minutes of panic, we found our way to the connecting Las Vegas flight.

The temperature in this gambling city in the middle of the Nevada desert was about 110 degrees, and even at night it was so warm you felt like jumping in the hotel swimming pool to cool off. We were not in the least interested in gambling, and would not have spent two nights in Las Vegas had it not been included in the package. However, we did enjoy the dazzling lights and the excellent, inexpensive self-service restaurants in the casinos where you could pile up your plates with as much as you could eat very cheaply. Obviously the intention was that you should spend your money gambling, but we did not put so much as one cent in the machines between us during our visit, not least because neither of us understood how modern slot machines work, and I still don’t. Anything more complicated than the old-fashioned one-armed bandit where you pull the lever and hope for three cherries or three bars completely foxes me.

Our hotel was some way out, at the end of ‘The Strip’ and down a side street. I remember shopping in a supermarket on the way and discovering a huge can of V8 vegetable juice on sale which I loved. In America it is widely advertised and very cheap, but in the UK it was only available in small cans, is quite expensive, and not nearly so well known. I drank the whole giant can in the heat of this neon oasis in the desert.

Whilst in Las Vegas we went on a sightseeing trip, during which Liberace’s home, among others, was pointed out to us. We also had the opportunity of a flight over the Grand Canyon, and much to my regret we missed out on this, feeling it was just too expensive.

Next stop on our itinerary was Los Angeles, where we were staying in a downtown hotel for three nights. L.A. has been described as seventytwo suburbs in search of a city, so there is no real central or downtown area, and where we were staying was a main street near the old City Hall skyscraper (famous from the old 1950s Superman TV series). This street was lined on either side with cinemas, built in the heyday of Hollywood for showing the latest releases. We discovered that not one of them were showing any films in English, and the whole downtown area was entirely Spanish speaking. All the shops sold Hispanic food, and all shop signs, notices, etc. were in Spanish, which was the only language we heard spoken in that area. We had been considering a one day trip over the border to Tijuana in Mexico, but since we seemed to be in Mexico already as soon as we stepped outside our hotel, there did not seem any point, so we gave that trip a miss.

Unlike New York, which has an excellent subway system, we never did get the hang of Los Angeles’ rather poor public transport system. There were buses, but it was difficult to discover how to get anywhere specific. However, during our visit we saw the famous Hollywood sign in white letters on a hillside, we visited Universal Studios (which is much more of a theme park than a genuine film studio). We saw the Chinese Theater and the stars’ autographs, hand and footprints in the sidewalk and, of course, the highlight of possibly the whole trip, we visited Disneyland, spending all day and staying to see the illuminated parade after dark. We loved the rides, and found it totally unlike any other amusement or theme park we had visited. We even walked through a replica of the French Quarter in New Orleans, which gave us a foretaste of our visit there a few years later.

Next day, Tuesday, we flew the farthest west we were ever to travel together, to Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands. We were now 11 hours behind British Summer Time, and quite near the International Dateline. As we approached Honolulu airport at night it was like a fairytale land below, full of mysterious twinkling lights. As we stepped off the plane garlands of flowers were placed around our neck, a traditional Hawaiian greeting for all visitors. George and I had our photos taken (separately) with an exotic Hawaiian girl with a flower in her hair. An exotic Hawaiian boy would have been more to our taste, but he was reserved for the photos with the female arrivals (perhaps we should have dressed in drag).

We were staying in Waikiki, the main resort area of Honolulu. It was a high rise area very reminiscent of the Spanish Costas, except this was more exotic with taller palm trees, and everybody in colorful Hawaiian shirts and dresses.

We fell in love with Hawaii, which felt much more like being in Polynesia than in the United States (in fact it is in both). There was a group of musicians we saw several times playing in the street near our hotel, consisting of two male guitarists, and a well-built female singer in a colorful, Hawaiian ankle-length costume and a big flower in her hair, who played a mandolin-type instrument as she sang. There was also a younger woman, similarly attired (possibly her daughter) who sometimes danced, Hawaiian style, to the music. We loved this group, and would stop and listen whenever we passed. The music was typically Hawaiian, but the only individual number I can remember was ‘Blue Hawaii’ made famous by Elvis Presley.

The weather in Hawaii was warm, but surprisingly cloudy. It is in a latitude where the temperature stays warm throughout the year and there are no real seasons, but they do get quite a lot of rain. However, the sea and air temperature are so warm you can swim in the sea when it is raining. We did have quite a bit of sun each day, and one day when there was no cloud at all we stayed on the beach and got terribly sunburnt, not realizing the power of the sun this near the Equator. We were both in agony for days afterwards.
 

We visited the zoo (we had also visited the Bronx zoo in New York on one of our trips), also Pearl Harbor and downtown Honolulu, where we discovered frozen yoghurt for the first time. It was delicious. We had the misfortune of being in Waikiki on July 4th, American Independence Day, which is the day they light fireworks. Whether it is true of all American high rise cities I could not say, but certainly Waikiki was no place to be out on the streets on July 4th, because crazy people threw enormous firecrackers down from the skyscrapers, especially after dark. Our hotel restaurant was across the street, and we were literally too scared to go out and eat. In the end we made a mad dash, firecrackers raining down all around us, ate our meal and dashed back across the road to the safety of our hotel, not daring to venture further afield that evening.

We did not take the opportunity to see more of the island whilst in Honolulu, which perhaps we should have done, nor did we visit any of the other islands. We were quite happy drinking in the atmosphere of Honolulu/Waikiki and enjoying the beach and the rest between our city sightseeing on the mainland. We had five full days in Hawaii, and spent quite a lot of time on the beach. George probably did this for my sake as much as anything, but he really preferred exploring cities to outlying nature reserves and tourist-orientated ‘culture centers’, so we skipped the coach trip round the island. We saw genuine Hawaiian culture in the streets and parks of Waikiki in the form of Hula dancers and Hawaiian music and singing, and did not feel the need to travel to a special show for tourists, though I do now regret not seeing more of the island.

There was one unpleasant incident I remember, which was entirely my fault. I was aware of a military base in Waikiki, and like many gay men I have always been attracted to uniforms. American uniforms held a special attraction for me, and one day we were walking along the main street in Waikiki and George caught me looking at someone (I believe he was in uniform, but certainly he was not a Polynesian native of Hawaii). George accused me of wishing I had been on my own, since the look in my eyes said I felt if George was not there I might score. He felt, at that moment, that he was in the way. I have always remembered this incident, and it hurt at the time and hurts even more now, because George exactly read my thoughts at that precise moment. Naturally, I felt guilty about it then, and even more so now that George is dead. It is not that I ever really wanted him out of the way, but there are times we all feel our style is being cramped, and George caught me at one moment when I would have liked to have been free to do some cruising to investigate the possibilities of meeting an American Serviceman in uniform.

It was not as if we were in a completely monogamous relationship, since we both used to see other people sexually, and indeed we did the gay backroom clubs in both New York and San Francisco on this trip, but George had to have a supply of amphetamines in order to get in the mood or even think about anything sexual, so if I was feeling in the mood and he had no supply of ‘sweeties’, as he called them, we were in deep trouble. I had to curb my impulses, or it would ruin our holiday.
 

I could easily have waited till we got to San Francisco and George had either obtained a fresh supply of sweeties, or used the ones he was saving up for our visit to that city. However, I knew it was only in Waikiki I stood any real chance, however remote, of meeting a military guy in uniform because of the proximity of the military base to a nearby cottage (public toilet) with a glory-hole which held distinct possibilities. This sense of frustration on my part caused tension between us, because George was very sensitive to moods, and could often read me like a book. However, I curbed my impulses as much as I could. Quite likely nothing would have happened had I felt free to cruise, since Waikiki is hardly a gay paradise as far as I know.

Whilst in Waikiki we went to see a rather strange film called ‘The Island’. We also bought the obligatory Hawaiian shirts. Mine was bright green and George’s blue, both covered in exotic colored flowers, and we wore these almost constantly whilst on the island. They were particularly useful in view of our sunburn, as they were very loose fitting.

On the Sunday, our sunburn thankfully wearing off, we flew back east to San Francisco for our final four nights. George immediately fell in love with the city, because if its friendly atmosphere and almost European architecture. Then there were the hills and cable cars, which made this a unique American city. I also liked it, but still preferred New York.

We saw all the sights including the Golden Gate Bridge, the pyramid skyscraper built to withstand earthquakes, Fisherman’s Wharf and we also had a distant view of the prison island of Alcatraz. We had a ride on a cable car on at least one occasion.

We visited the gay bars and backrooms, and who knows whether George got his fatal infection here, in New York, or possibly back home in London? Certainly HIV was prevalent in San Francisco and New York in 1980 when we were there, whilst it was virtually unknown in London back then.

We walked into one bar, where gay pornographic videos were being shown on a screen above the bar. There was nothing outside to warn the general public, and we were rather shocked as anyone could have walked in off the street just for a drink – possibly a man and his wife, or even a woman on her own. Two guys were watching the screen fascinated, and one of them said to us: ‘This wouldn’t be allowed back home in Texas’.

We explained it would not be allowed back home in England either, though we were going through a liberal patch in London which lasted about three years during which such films were shown at certain seedy establishments in and around Soho, but the clampdown came very soon. Here in San Francisco such things were accepted as a matter of course, and at one gay backroom cinema club, called ‘The Nob Hill Cine-club’, we were handed a membership card on the back of which was printed a list of statements which would cause any British lawmaker or police officer to have an apoplexy. I reproduce it in full below:

‘- The bearer is admitted to the membership of the Nob Hill Cine-Club.

- The Nob Hill Cine-Club is a members only social and artistic facility dedicated to cinema and conviviality. Members are entitled to use and enjoy all of our facilities.

- We believe in a atmosphere of freedom for consenting adults.

- If you are harassed or restricted by any unwelcome police agents or entrappers, please notify the management and we will provide legal representation to you at our expense.’
 

In London in the early 1990s gay clubs were still employing straight security men to throw people out on the street for such activities, in San Francisco over a decade earlier the club paid your legal expenses if the police dared interfere with your rights as a consenting gay adult. Now the San Francisco attitude is prevalent throughout Europe, Australia and the main cities of North America (although AIDS has caused some restrictions in the latter), and finally UK caught up in the first years of the 21^st Century, mainly due to having to comply with EU regulations on non-discrimination. This also meant an equal age of consent and civil partnerships, which are universally referred to as ‘marriages’.

In San Francisco everyone seemed friendly, and the city had an almost carnival atmosphere. The main streets were full of open-air theater, with crowds gathering around to watch all sorts of entertainers performing.

We visited the Amnesty International office in a Victorian-style house, which was quite a contrast to the AI office in New York which we had also visited. The night before leaving San Francisco we went to a very ornate cinema, The Alhambra, to see ‘Hangar 18′. The exterior of the cinema was built like a mosque, complete with two minarets.

On the Thursday morning we began our long flight back home, changing planes at New York’s JFK airport. I was frantically hoping our London-bound flight would not be called until I had seen my favorite singer, Jerry Lee Lewis, perform on ‘The Eddie Rabbitt’ show in the coin-in-the-slot TVs in the terminal building. Just as the program was about to start our flight was called. It was then delayed for about an hour, and I sat fuming with frustration in the plane whilst my idol played one of his best-ever versions of ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ just minutes after I had technically left American soil, although we were still on the tarmac. It is the only time he has been on TV whilst I have been in the States, and I missed him by minutes. I later obtained the show on video, so I now know I had every right to feel frustrated to miss such a show whilst trapped on a plane a few yards from the terminal television screens.

We arrived back at Heathrow, considerably jet-lagged after the very long flight and 8 hour time difference since we left San Francisco. It had been a wonderful trip, and one we would always remember.

On September 10th it was our tenth anniversary of meeting. I wanted to give George something special, and racked my brains. In the end I decided on an engraved glass of some kind, with our two names and the figure ‘10′. When you are not looking for something out of the ordinary like this, you see such things everywhere, but when you really want something you never find it easily. I looked in Yellow Pages and only a few places were listed. Foolishly, I chose one in Belgravia which charged sky-high prices, but I was so determined to get this special token of our ten years together I ordered it anyway. I could only afford to have our two initials and a figure 10 engraved on a plain brandy glass. I think it cost £15 back in 1980, which was way, way above the going rate for such things. Later, after I had given George the present, I found out where I could get much more elaborate engraved glass for just a few pounds.

The reaction, when I gave the present to George, was not what I had expected. He soon got out of me how much it cost, and he was absolutely furious that I had been silly enough to be ripped off in this way. He was not a great one for present-giving, and the glass was hardly very decorative. Still, he was a bit more appreciative later, but we both felt bad that I had paid at least three times its real value.

On November 22nd George has written in his diary: ‘Mae West died’. She was, of course, a gay icon, and we loved all her films, tatty as they were. We also loved her recordings, but her last film, ‘Sextette’, was never released in the UK during George’s lifetime, so he never saw it. It appeared on TV after he died, and I recorded it and will always keep it as I think it is the best film she ever made, despite it being panned by the critics. The very fact she could make a film at all at around her mid-80s is a miracle, and that she could still manage to look glamorous and to deliver all her old one-liners plus a few new ones without sounding ridiculous, testifies to her legendary status as a unique star without equal. It was a sad day for both of us when she finally did die, and took all her secrets to the grave with her. Some people suspected she was really a man in drag, or possibly a transsexual. She was certainly a revolutionary in promoting sexual liberation decades before the Swinging 60s, and she did it with a wry sense of humor and an ability to laugh at herself which modern day liberationists and her critics do not seem to appreciate.

Those who panned ‘Sextette’ for being tatty, and ridiculous in casting an 85 year old woman as a nymphomaniac whom young men are falling over themselves to go to bed with, miss the entire point: Mae West always did everything tongue-in-cheek and over the top. She never made a film till she was fat and forty, so making her last one at around 85 was just a new twist to an old joke. If she really was pushed along on castors and had the lines fed to her through earphones beneath her blond wig, it certainly does not come across that way in the finished film. She performs her swaying, mincing walk and delivers her lines as convincingly as ever. I can only surmise a jealous younger generation spread these foul rumors because they knew they did not have half the talent at 20 or 30 which Mae had at 85 or so, and which enabled her to steal the show and put all the younger actors in the film in the shade.

George’s diary for 1981 starts off in early January with a few days he spent in Rome with a friend of ours called Eric. As we had visited Rome several times, I  did not feel like going again at that time so stayed at home.

George and Eric (who was not gay) stayed in a little hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps. There was some delay with the flight back, and they had to stay an extra night in the hotel at the tour company’s expense. George phoned me to let me know he would be a day late. They had a good time, visiting St Peter’s and other sights, but George told me one amusing story which shows he got exasperated with Eric at times. George had gone into a shop, and left our friend standing outside. When George came out, Eric said to him: ‘George, do I look Italian?’

George asked what prompted the question and Eric explained with a perplexed tone: ‘Well, this woman came up to me and started talking to me in Italian’.

George pointed out that they were, after all, in Italy, so what language did Eric expect Romans to speak – Chinese? Our friend still seemed puzzled, as though British tourists had ‘I only speak English’ tattooed on their foreheads or something.

The last weekend of February George and I spent in Amsterdam together. It was very cold – there was snow on the pavements, and in Volendam the canal was frozen over leaving ducks waddling on the ice. We went to see the picturesque village, but of course the coach trip included the obligatory cheese and clog factories.

Later that Spring we attended ‘An Evening With Quentin Crisp’ at the Mayfair Theater off Piccadilly. Of course, George knew Quentin personally from the days before he became famous (when he was infamous in fact). The first half of Quentin’s show consisted of a monolog on ‘style’, and in the second half he answered questions from the audience which they wrote out on cards during the interval. I put in a question based on something my favorite singer, Jerry Lee Lewis, frequently ad-libbed at the end of one of his songs:  ‘A famous singer has said he does not want a headstone on his grave, he wants a monument. Would you say he has style?’

Quentin replied to the effect that it did not matter what happened once you were dead, the point was to have style whilst you were alive. One of my favorite Crispisms is his advice about never trying ‘to keep up with the Joneses – drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.’

Apparently Crisp has since his death frequently materialized at séances conducted by Australian physical medium, David Thompson, and still very much has style, being as camp as he ever was in life. I’ve heard the recordings on the Internet, so Quentin has evidently revised his answer to me and decided it does matter to have style after you die as well, very much so. How else would people recognize him?

At the end of May we spent a Bank Holiday weekend in Paris, but it merges into so many other visits to that city I cannot now recall anything specific. However my Super-8 film clips show that my mother came with us and of course we took her to the top of the Eiffel Tower and showed her Montmartre, Notre Dame and all the other tourist sights.

In June we flew off for a one week trip to New York, our last ever visit to that city together. The day after we arrived there was a huge gay march from Greenwich Village to Central park. It was so inspiring to see, and participate in, with marching bands, people in fancy dress (including someone in drag wearing a Richard Nixon mask), and a large contingent of parents of lesbians and gay men. One woman held up a sign saying: ‘My gay son is the greatest’, and an old lady on Fifth Avenue stood on the sidewalk with a homemade cardboard placard reading: ‘Grandma for gays’. People all along Fifth Avenue gave us a traditional New York tickertape welcome by throwing scraps of paper out of their high rise windows, and the balconies were crowded all along the route as people waved and cheered. New York really is the friendliest city on Earth, despite what people say.

As we were walking along Fifth Avenue on the march, someone must have heard our accents and mistook George for one of the Bloolips, the British drag cabaret troupe which was currently visiting New York. ‘I saw you in Bloolips yesterday’ he said excitedly, possibly hoping for an autograph, but George had to deny it, explaining we had only arrived last night on the plane from England. We were lucky in joining two gay marches on our visits to the States, as we had previously joined the one in Washington D.C., which was also very impressive.

On the Monday we visited Coney Island again. We saw a film whilst in New York, ‘The History of the World Part 1′, and we went to a show at the fantastic art deco Radio City Music Hall. On the Friday we visited my penfriend Dee in Baltimore. The bus back arrived in Manhattan at about 3 a.m. in the morning, and we were a bit nervous about walking to our hotel at such a time, because of the city’s violent reputation. We need not have worried. As we walked the few blocks from the bus station in Eighth Avenue to our hotel just off Times Square, we were amazed to see all sorts of people strolling about, including old grannies doing their shopping, as nearly all the stores in this street stayed open all night long.

Whilst in New York we went on a helicopter trip, which was a rather scary yet exhilarating experience, looking down on the skyscrapers and knowing if the engine stopped you would be plunged into the canyon-like streets far below. George scolded me for giving him the Super-8 camera to operate (since he was by the window) as it spoilt the flight for him when I kept telling him where to point it. The 15-minute trip was soon over, but well worth the £15 or so it cost us.
 

We flew back on Independence Day, July 4th. We had decided we did not want to risk being pelted with firecrackers from the Manhattan skyscrapers, after our experience the year before in Waikiki. We felt safer watching ‘The Clash of the Titans’ on the plane home.

Later that week we saw a fabulous production called ‘One Mo’ Time’ at the Cambridge Theater. It had a mainly black cast and was based on New Orleans Jazz and Blues. It had excellent music and songs, including one sung by a big black woman which went: ‘You’ve got the right key baby but the wrong keyhole’, and the climax of the show was when the cast, led by a jazz band, came into the audience, up the aisles and invited us all to form a Conga line. We danced around the auditorium, then right out into the street, around Seven Dials and back into the theater again. It was really fantastic, like being in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

In early September we flew to Copenhagen with our friend Eric, we then traveled the next day by coach to Gothenburg for one night. Then on to Oslo for two nights, which included our 11th anniversary of meeting. Finally we visited Stockholm for two nights, before returning to Copenhagen. In just one week we had seen the capitals of three Scandinavian countries, and although Eric missed the Norwegian fjords, which he had seen on a previous trip, we were quite pleased with this whirlwind tour which gave us a flavor of Scandinavia.

We loved the rural scenery, the fantastic statues of Oslo, the buildings of Stockholm including the Town hall with its huge main chamber, the walls of which were stunningly decorated in gold leaf. We also went on a river trip in Stockholm, though Eric did not come with us on this. We enjoyed our final two days in Copenhagen, with its fantastic collection of spires, one of which we climbed up. It was a church with a gold spiral staircase on the outside of the green spire. Eric was too scared, but George and I climbed right to the tip where the staircase dwindled to nothing beneath the golden ball at the top of the spire. There was another spire in the city shaped like entwined serpents with clawed feet, and of course we also saw the famous little mermaid statue on the rock.

I got a real taste for caviar in Scandinavia, as some of the hotels had little packets of red caviar paste on the breakfast table along with the butter and marmalade. I always chose the caviar, and brought home a pocketful of these little packs which I ate up within a week, after giving a few to friends to try.

About the turn of the year George began the first of his long-term bouts of unemployment since we had met. He had worked full-time at Amnesty International since 1980, and after two years had now left because he was fed up with what he and others saw as the waste of money and bad management.  When he was on holiday, for instance, £500 was spent on one telegram rather than train someone to send telexes. He asked for meetings with his boss to sort out such problems, but his requests were ignored.

One of the final straws seems petty, but it was typical of the attitude he felt prevailed: his script for the Christmas pantomime was rejected in favor of an inferior one submitted by a new employee considered more important than a mere telex operator. Only months before George had written a brilliant script on the occasion of the departure of Martin Ennals as Secretary General, and the sketch about two cleaners discovering secrets in the old Secretary General’s office was a great success when performed by two staff members. Unfortunately we were in America at the time and missed the only public performance of a script written by George, and we had to be content with hearing an audio recording. Despite this recent success, and a very topical script about the International Secretariat’s forthcoming move to new premises, his script was rejected. George had been to the trade union representative about his work related problems, and incredibly the shop steward told him to resign from the job and ‘we’ll take it from there’. So George finally took this not very helpful advice in desperation.

Soon afterwards in February 1982, when the British Section announced the nomination of Jeremy Thorpe as their next Director, George wrote a letter to ‘The Guardian’ protesting. Jeremy Thorpe had recently been involved in a controversial court case also involving Norman Scott, and the judge’s summing up had received much criticism from the satirical Left, including a brilliant sketch by Peter Cook in ‘The Secret Policeman’s Ball’ which, ironically, was a fundraising event for the British Section of A.I.. Although Jeremy Thorpe won the case, many people felt he was inappropriate to be spokesperson for the UK Section, and George wrote along these lines, taking the opportunity to point out some of the deficiencies of the International Secretariat of A.I. which had led to his resignation. Years later this letter was still on file at the I.S. and George was blacklisted till the day he died, not even allowed to work at A.I. as a volunteer. His only crime was trying to save the organization money by criticizing what he saw as its financial mismanagement, but he suffered the fate of most whistle blowers. I repeat below in full his letter to ‘The Guardian’:

‘Sir,

‘Having recently reluctantly resigned from the International Secretariat of Amnesty, due to disillusion and despair about its management and administration, I can affirm that its appointment of Jeremy Thorpe as Director of its British Section only accentuates the already existent problems within the organisation. There was a mass exodus of long-term staff towards the end of 1981, due to disputes, frustrations and fears, not to mention growing discontent between national sections and the International Secretariat.

‘My personal grievance was with the increasingly unnecessary expenditure in certain areas, which as a fundraiser I found appalling, and said so openly, but to no avail.
 

‘The staff of Amnesty international consist of two distinct classes: those who are genuinely and primarily dedicated to human rights and those who are primarily dedicated to careerism, opportunism and the ‘‘perks’‘ of the post. The appointment of Jeremy Thorpe exemplifies the absurdity of the movement’s administration. The ever-expanding offices are crying out for more professional administrators.

‘I have hitherto refrained from publicly voicing my criticisms, because I feared that any adverse publicity might be detrimental to the movement. Now that the Jeremy Thorpe affair has made criticism and condemnation inevitable, I need no longer have any reservations on this matter.

‘On the contrary, Amnesty’s aim is to write about the wrongs of human rights in the hope of rectifying them. Unless its membership is made aware of, and solves, the administration problems, the respect and recognition which has been built up over the years will be replaced by cynicism and scepticism.

Yours sincerely,’

Amnesty International wrote a reply to this letter, also published in ‘The Guardian’, which seemed to confirm the elitism and careerism George criticized by unnecessarily drawing attention to the fact that George was their former telex operator. The clear implication was that his letter and views could therefore be disregarded as that of a mere low-grade menial. However, perhaps his letter did influence someone in high places – certainly amid all the controversy Jeremy Thorpe withdrew and never took up the nomination as Director of the British Section.

George signed on at the unemployment office which featured prominently in the last ten years of his life. He only had two bouts of permanent paid employment after leaving Amnesty International, amounting to about three years in total.

The day before my birthday, March 19th, we flew off to Athens accompanied by Eric. It was a pretty disastrous holiday, with a lot of rain.

Athens is fine for a day trip, but not much fun for a week. After you have seen the Acropolis there’s nothing else to see or do really. We had a one day cruise round the nearer islands of Aegina, Poros and Hydra in the rain, saw a couple of films ‘Evil Under the Sun’ and ‘Absence of Malice’, and paid a visit to the ruins of Delphi.

Eric seemed to be constantly ringing his mother back home, and was being chased on holiday by a middle aged woman (he has that little boy lost look which makes older women want to mother him). It was, in fact, the last time George saw Eric, for he broke contact with us afterwards. We thought it was over some critical remark George had made about Eric keep ringing his mother which we thought he’d overheard, but Eric confided with me years later, when he got in touch again after George’s death, that he was upset because George had added Eric’s name to a postcard he sent to his ex-girlfriend Marlene from Greece. Apparently Eric was trying to cut contacts with Marlene at the time.

Many photos of this holiday are overcast, but we did have a few spells of sunshine. We found Athens a city of smog and pollution, unappetizing food and wideboys. We walked down a main street and noticed a grubby looking snack bar with a plate of what we took for imitation fried food in the window (a fried egg and some bacon, etc.). We rejected this place, and came to a street lined with restaurants and waiters trying to entice you in – thrusting the menu into your hands on the street and trying to push you into their establishment. Their rivals meanwhile tried to entice, pull or shove you in the opposite direction. Hating all this, we went back to the greasy spoon in desperation, but when they tried to serve us up the plate with the congealed, rubbery fried egg in the window which we had seen about an hour before, we walked out of the shop in disgust.

In the street a friendly man, as gullible Eric and myself thought, said he knew a nice cafeteria which was cheap, and started leading us to one of the main squares. George shouted at us not to follow as it was a trap, but Eric and I were already stepping out lured by the promise of cheap wholesome grub. George could do nothing but follow, and the man led us eventually down some dimly lit sleazy dive with no food in sight and a couple of hookers sitting on stools by a bar. We made our quick exit, and Eric exclaimed in innocent bewilderment:

‘It wasn’t a cafeteria. There was no food there,  just a couple of girls sitting at a bar.’

‘Of course not, he was leading you into a clip joint’, said George exasperatedly, ‘and you two followed like two sheep.’ Of course George, being streetwise, had spotted the tout for what he was a mile off. After a rather miserable week we returned home to London.

On April 23rd we went on a march against the Malvinas/Falklands war, now raging in the South Atlantic. We were both strongly against the war, and wholly in sympathy with the Argentineans. We had no time whatsoever for the British settlers who would not even allow Argentineans to live on the islands which Britain had previously stolen from them. It was as if Argentina had kicked all the British out of the Isle of Wight and claimed it for her own.

I have a very fond memory of George when he and I visited a church in the City of London where Defense Minister John Nott was speaking to the lunchtime City crowd. We mingled with the congregation, and as he started to leave the pulpit we shouted ‘murderer’ and held up home-made paper placards we had hidden under our coats. This was at the height of the Malvinas/Falklands conflict and after the sinking of the Belgrano. George’s placard read: ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, and John Nott remarked as he passed: ‘There’s a difference between killing and murder, dear boy.’ Since the Bible quotation indicated all killing was prohibited, this distinction seemed doubtful and irrelevant.

I was very proud of George on this occasion, and it showed how close we had grown politically. It was a very brave thing to do, and we gave each other mutual moral support for this lone protest. George was also once arrested with me on a civil disobedience demo outside Upper Heyford Air Force base in Oxfordshire protesting against nuclear bombers.

In  June we paid a visit to Glasgow, then went to stay in George’s sister’s caravan in Kinghorn, across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, which we also visited. We had a day in Dundee but were not very impressed. This was the home not only of the cake, but of D. C. Thompson, publishers of cartoon characters in the ‘Beano’, ‘Dandy’ and the Scottish paper ‘the Sunday Post’. George especially loved ‘The Broons’ from the latter, fondly remembered from his childhood days.

In September we paid a visit to Bath in Somerset and saw the famous spa, the bridge with shops on it and the classical crescent which impressed us by its sheer size (I had to take two photos to fit it all in).
 

During October we spent a weekend in Paris and re-visited our favorite haunts, and we ended the year with our traditional New Year’s Eve party.

The year 1983 began with a sad occasion. Freda had been discovered dead in his council flat near Waterloo station. His dog, Sandy, was okay, though Freda had been dead several days when they found him. This was always his greatest fear, that he would die in the flat and by the time they found him Sandy would have also died from thirst and hunger. If Freda ever felt ill he used to open his front door, but the heart attack which killed him must have come too suddenly.

We would miss him at the Porchester Hall drag balls, where he won most of the prizes, and at our parties where he did a regular cabaret act. We would also miss his occasional cabaret spots at the Cricketers Pub next door to our tower block.

We went to the funeral, at a crematorium in Tooting where George and several other friends and neighbors from South London were eventually taken. We met up with Freda’s family at the funeral directors near Vauxhall, and were rather bowled over to discover he had two absolutely stunning relatives, presumably nephews, tall, blond and extremely good-looking. Freda was surrounded by handsome men most of his life, and even at  his funeral. We traveled in one of the cars and said our final farewell to Freda.

In February we paid the first of several visits to the BBC’s ‘Question Time’ as part of the live audience. This first show was at a studio behind London Bridge station. We especially appreciated the sandwiches and alcoholic refreshment they provided, but at later recordings they had dispensed with the alcohol and it was soft drinks only. Apparently some of the audience had become rather too inebriated before the program went on the air.

The next day we were off on the big one, a two week holiday to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. It was to be the last time we visited the USA together. It was a deal we had arranged independently through a little travel agents in Vauxhall Underground station booking hall which specialized in destinations like the States and Australia, and they had arranged a very good hotel (La Salle) right on the edge of the French Quarter overlooking Canal Street where all the big Mardi Gras parades took place, so we had a bird’s eye view. I had also arranged some hotels and trips in Memphis, Nashville and Natchez for myself, as I wanted to see places associated with my idol Jerry Lee Lewis, Rock’n’Roll and Country music. George was to stay in New Orleans, as he did not fancy being dragged around these musical shrines.      

There was snow on the ground when we left Gatwick, but when we arrived at New Orleans, after a change of planes at the impressive Atlanta airport, it was clear blue skies and sunshine.

Our hotel room overlooked Canal Street, and below was a theater where Lena Horne was appearing. George rang our friend Andre from the hotel bedroom, and Andre could hear all the sounds of New Orleans over the phone. Parades passed by our window almost every day up until Mardi Gras on the Tuesday. Of course, we went down in the street and joined in the fun, trying to catch the ‘favors’ thrown from the floats. These were colored plastic bead necklaces, coins, cups, etc., and we brought back a whole bagful. The thing to do was to shout: ‘Throw me something, mister’ as the floats went by, and then leap up and try and catch as many favors as you could before someone else got them. It was all great fun, and we had the time of our lives, getting into the spirit of things by buying Mardi Gras hats. George’s was a bowler covered in gold glitter, and I had a mauve and yellow Austrian Tyrol style hat with colored feathers in it. George also wore his Hawaiian shirt, and a gold eye mask. Everyone was dressed up in outrageous style.

The floats and parades were very ornate, and once you’ve seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans you are spoiled for any other parades. This is the big one, and it goes on for days, culminating in Mardi Gras itself on Shrove Tuesday.

The day before, St Valentine’s Day as it happened, we went on a Mississippi River cruise on the paddle-steamer ‘Natchez’. It all sounds very romantic, but in actual fact the section of the Mississippi we saw resembled the Manchester Ship Canal. Instead of cotton fields, bayous and alligators all we saw were industrial warehouses and cranes on either side. Still, it was an experience, and whilst on the boat a plane flew over the city and wrote ‘Welcome’ in a vapor trail in the clear blue sky.

A middle-aged couple overheard George’s accent, and told him they did so admire The Queen and the Royal Family. If they thought they were speaking to one of her loyal subjects, they got a rude shock when George snapped back: ‘You don’t have to pay for them.’ George and I were both ardent republicans, and had no time at all for the Royal Family.

We enjoyed New Orleans very much, especially the French Quarter. We sometimes used to have our breakfast in Woolworths, where a big black woman behind the counter asked us: ‘Y’all want grits?’

We had heard of grits, but after trying it once decided it wasn’t for us. We also frequented a diner just across the road where we got a great bacon and egg breakfast for about a dollar. We found a self-service restaurant the other side of Canal Street from our hotel, where we ate our main meals. We tried gumbo, the traditional soup of Louisiana, and became hooked on it.

Our hotel was on a corner of Canal Street near the Bolivar statue, and just around the corner was Louis Armstrong Park, which we also visited.

There were one or two unhappy moments. One night we were in the French Quarter, George wearing his gold glitter bowler which he had just bought, and we ended up in a gay bar. Anything goes in the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, so it was pretty wild. We went out on to the typical first floor New Orleans wrought-iron balcony, and George struck up an acquaintance with a guy from Chicago who was hooked on John Cleese in ‘Fawlty Towers’ and had all the videos. We then went inside the room above the main bar, where everything was happening. We joined in, but something George saw in there upset him, not so much what I had done, but another person was performing a big exhibitionist number which George felt was humiliating me and a lot of other people around me.

George was a bit quiet when we came out, but pointed out something in a bar as we walked down the street. I looked in the door, and became enthralled with two male go-go dancers on a small stage, or the bar-top, I’m not sure which. George looked in, and that was it. He stormed off, very upset, with me following him. He said all I was interested in was sex, sex, sex, and that I was ruining his holiday. I protested that he had wanted to go to the gay bar as much as me, and he had pointed out the go-go dancers. He replied he had been pointing out something else entirely (I forget what now), and had not even seen the dancers.

He sat down in a side street in tears, and I put my arm around him and tried to console him. Eventually he seemed to recover, and admitted to me it was the incident in the gay bar we’d visited which had really upset him. Of course the real reason for George’s outburst was that the effect of the amphetamines were wearing off and he couldn’t handle anything sexual once this happened. It made our relationship so very difficult, this having to time anything to do with sex with whenever he was high on speed.
 

There was one other unhappy incident, shortly before we returned to London. We had gone to Lake Ponchartrain in the suburbs of New Orleans, and on the way back we walked through a park. Suddenly we came to a busy freeway, and it was a tiresome diversion to a pedestrian tunnel to cross it. The fence was broken, and obviously many people had crossed by that route. So I foolishly suggested we cross there, but we got to the central reservation and were stranded for quite some time as traffic sped by at alarmingly high speeds. It was quite frightening, because of the sheer speed of the vehicles. Finally there was a gap and we just tore across as fast as we could, praying we didn’t trip and fall. It was like haring across the M1, and George said it was one of the worst moments of his life, and had ruined a good day out.

There were other minor mishaps. We went to a film in one of the shopping malls across the River in the Algiers district. There were few cinemas in the center of New Orleans, and you had to travel to the suburbs to see recent releases. We went by bus, but when we came out at about 6pm we were amazed to discover the buses had finished for the day. New Orleans is not like New York City, where public transport runs all night. I started shouting and raving at the cinema staff, complaining I’d never been in such a crazy city where public transport finished in the late afternoon and how did they expect us to get back to our hotel after the film had finished? George said I was showing myself up and becoming embarrassing, and clearly the cinema staff thought I was a raving loony in a city where only the poorest people used public transport and you were considered eccentric if you didn’t have a car.

We walked down a slip road from the shopping mall complex, and found ourselves in the poor, black residential district of Algiers. Oblivious to the dangers in this part of the city, we found a bus stop where a timetable showed the local buses were still running, so eventually we got back safely to the French Quarter.

While I was away in Tennessee and rural Louisiana, George visited another cinema (to see Paul Newman in ‘The Verdict’ I believe) in a similar complex north of the city, and had to walk home maybe ten miles. I would have been extremely worried if I’d known beforehand. He walked along the busy road which encircles the city, till he came to where most of the graveyards of New Orleans are located. There is an intersection here, with a road leading straight down into Canal Street. George saw a big black woman approaching, and asked her the direction. She said he could keep right on to the intersection and turn right, or take a short cut through the cemeteries, but she added that he may not want to do that at night. George replied it was the living he was scared of, not the dead, and he said she rolled her eyes and guffawed with laughter. So George went through the cemeteries, and eventually arrived back at the hotel.

He said he enjoyed himself whilst I was away, especially slipping out about 3 a.m. in the morning to visit the local 24 hour A&P supermarket, and then buying a whole roast chicken on his way back to the hotel, which he ate piping hot in his hotel room (George was always one for midnight snacks.) He also saw a production of ‘One Mo’ Time’ at the Toulouse Theater, which he liked very much, and he visited the Museum of Modern Art and the flea market among other places.

We both took the St Charles streetcar to the Garden district, with its fine houses. We also had ourselves photographed by a streetcar named Desire, which unfortunately no longer runs. It has been replaced by a bus called Desire, which doesn’t have quite the same Tennessee Williams ring to it. Buses and trams in New Orleans were all identified by their destination, not by numbers at that time, and Desire is a district in New Orleans. There was also a bus called by the less romantic name of Cemeteries.
 

We both saw the Dustin Hoffman film ‘Tootsie’ together, in which he convincingly dragged up to play a woman in order to further his career. We also visited Preservation Hall and were very impressed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, who were all musicians in their 70s or 80s. One of the tunes we both fondly remembered was ‘Where The Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day’ sung by a little old man. It was a lovely experience, and very inexpensive, but it is a tiny venue and gets extremely crowded, so you only stay half an hour or so at a time, to make room for others.

The day after Mardi Gras I went off on the Greyhound bus to visit Nashville and Memphis in Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi.

In Nashville I saw the Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ole Opry), the Country Music Hall of Fame, and attended a performance of the Grand Ole Opry itself at its new home in Opryland, hosted by Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl. I’m surprised I wasn’t lynched, as Roy asked the audience to stand and clap a five-star general in the audience who would ‘give the order to nuke the Russians’, and I remained firmly in my seat refusing to clap the bastard, whilst everyone else stood and clapped.

In Memphis I hired a car and drove around to see Jerry Lee Lewis’s current and former homes, including his ranch in Nesbit, Mississippi about 10 or 15 miles out of Memphis. I drove right up the driveway of the ranch and knocked on the door, and his housekeeper, Lottie, answered. She said Jerry was resting having just come out of hospital the day before, so I didn’t get to see him or the inside of his ranch on that occasion, unlike other fans who seemed to manage to see him, sometimes stay a week or so, and then stay with his sister in Ferriday. I had no such luck. I gave Lottie some of Jerry’s favorite Cuban cigars, took a few pictures around the grounds, and drove back to Memphis, pleased I had at least seen the ranch. Whilst in Memphis I also visited the famous Sun Records studios, where Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and others started out, and ‘Gracelands’, the former home of Elvis Presley, whose grave is in the grounds.

I was not very impressed with ‘Gracelands’, which is like a cottage with a neo-classical pillared entrance much too ostentatious for the size of the house. I thought Jerry’s Nesbit ranch was at least as impressive, with its large lake in the grounds. I got sick to the teeth of ‘Elvis, Elvis, Elvis’ in Memphis. At the time I was there everything seemed to be run by the Gracelands Corporation, including the Sun Record Company tour and the studio itself. You rarely heard a mention of Jerry Lee Lewis or any of the other rock’n’roll stars who started their career at the Memphis Sun studio. There were one or two photos on the wall in the studio of Jerry Lee, Johnny Cash, etc., but all the records on sale were Elvis’ RCA Victor stuff, not even his Sun recordings. It was very disappointing, but I’m glad to say things have improved since and the Sun Studio is no longer reduced to an Elvis record shop, and the Sun tour is now well worth doing, with tapes of the music recorded there and staff who really know their stuff. Memphis had a statue to Elvis, and a major road named after him, Elvis Presley Boulevard, where Gracelands is located. When I mentioned to one of the Elvis tour guides that I’d like to hear a bit about Jerry Lee and some of the other Memphis rock’n’roll pioneers she looked at me as if I was mad. Perhaps she’d never heard of them, since she was too young to remember the era herself.

Anybody going to Memphis expecting it to be a haven for rock’n’roll would have been disappointed at that time, though things have now improved with rock’n’roll and blues museums honoring the city’s musicians. When I went in 1983 the people who met me at the bus station to take me to the hotel were only interested in Benny Hill, and kept asking me about him because of my British accent. Sun records were virtually unobtainable in Memphis at that time (though reissues could be bought in Shelby Singleton’s revived Sun label premises in Nashville). There were no memorials or streets in honor of Jerry Lee, or any of the other rock’n’roll stars except Elvis, as far as I could tell, just a statue of bluesman W. C. Handy and a couple of Elvis (although now Jerry Lee has his handprints and his name inscribed in a musical note laid in the paving stones of Beale Street). I always thought Elvis was very overrated, certainly as a rocker, though he excelled in ballads. He was in any case too much of an obedient Establishment figure under the control of his manager Colonel Tom Parker to be a true rock’n’roll rebel, unlike Jerry Lee and Chuck Berry, for instance, the two real bad boys of rock’n’roll who continued to represent the anarchic, rebellious nature of rock’n’roll, cocking a snoop at society.

After Memphis I headed south, changing buses in Vicksburg, and finally arriving in Natchez, Mississippi for a one night stay. I wanted to hire a car right away, as I was visiting nearby Ferriday, Louisiana (birthplace of Jerry Lee Lewis) next day. However there were no places open where I could hire a car. I rang Hertz, and they said their nearest branch was Biloxi, hundreds of miles away on the Gulf of Mexico. So I had to grab the only taxi in town, which already had one passenger and was hanging around like a vulture for any other stranded bus passengers. It was driven by a decrepit old man, with his wife by his side. We set off, and came to a busy intersection where he sailed across right into the path of an oncoming car. We narrowly missed a disastrous side-on collision which would have killed us all, but the loyal wife consoled her visibly shaken husband by saying: ‘It wasn’t your fault, honey.’ Of course it was as the silly old fool tried to cross a major road without even slowing down or looking to see if the path was clear. 

Thankfully I climbed out of the taxi at my motel, a Best Western which had excellent food. The weather forecast that evening on TV was very depressing. They warned of flash floods for mid-Louisiana and the Miss-Lou area where I was staying, and advised against driving anywhere. In the event this was just alarmist exaggeration, and all I had to put up with was a persistent drizzle, which was nevertheless very annoying. We’d had beautiful sunny weather the rest of my stay in the South, yet the one day I got to visit my idol’s hometown it was raining all day. Return trips to Ferriday  in 1997, 1998 and 2002 also brought wet weather, so the ‘cool, Louisiana rain’ Jerry mentions in one of his autobiographical songs seems to be all too frequent.
 

I hired a car early the next morning, and saw most of the places in Ferriday I’d wanted to see. I ran into a former teacher of Jerry’s, Martha Paul, working in a service station shop, and she came with me to try to locate the house where Jerry was born, but we couldn’t find it and she said she thought it might have been demolished. She then rang Frankie Jean (Jerry’s sister) and told me where she worked, but by the time I got there Frankie had made herself scarce. (On my return in 1997 I did indeed visit her house, then partly given over to a very interesting Jerry Lee Lewis museum since it was also his childhood home, and met Frankie on that occasion and others.) I visited the nearby family cemetery where Jerry’s two sons, mother and father plus many other relations were buried. I only found this thanks to instructions from Jerry Lee’s former wife, Myra (the child-bride of the 1958 scandal) whom I’d met in London a few weeks before promoting her book ‘Great Balls of Fire’, later made into the Dennis Quaid film of the same title. Myra had drawn a map for me on the back of a Cumberland Hotel serviette, and given me precise instructions, but I still had trouble finding it and had to ask directions at lonely farmhouses, half expecting some redneck hillbilly to shoot me for invading their property. All I found was very polite, helpful Southern hospitality which eventually enabled me to locate the graveyard.

I also visited the Assembly of God (Pentecostal) church where Jerry first played piano in public, and other places of interest, including Jerry Lee Lewis Avenue, which was little more than a dirt track on the very edge of town at that time, but which was beginning to be developed. I then boarded the Greyhound to travel south past Baton Rouge to New Orleans.

I had kept in touch by phone with George, who was worried about my embarking on such a long trip on my own, and driving unfamiliar cars on the wrong side of the road when I wasn’t used to driving at all, having given up my van in London years before because of expense and parking problems. I thought George was going to be out at the cinema or somewhere when I arrived, so it was a very pleasant surprise indeed when he was waiting for me at the bus station.
 

I will always remember that happy reunion and his smiling face welcoming me ‘home’. We departed New Orleans in the early afternoon of Thursday and arrived back at Gatwick at 7.30 a.m. Friday morning. It had been one of our most memorable holidays.

After our holiday we had a quiet month or so. We were in the audience of another ‘Question Time’ in March, and we went on the revived (Jubilee) CND Aldermaston March at Easter. I went to Hyde Park with my local CND group for the start, and George and I traveled to Berkshire for the last lap. We walked all around the Aldermaston Weapons Research Establishment, which covers a huge area, pinning mementoes to the perimeter fence. I left a note recalling Malvin Side, an old campaigner who was on every anti-nuclear demo in the 60s and early 70s. We heard Pat Arrowsmith speaking from a parked truck, almost as if we’d gone back 25 years to the very first Aldermaston March which Pat helped to organize.
 

There was a gay pub below the tower block where we lived, ‘The Cricketers’,  and we saw some drag acts there in May. We were  hoping to do our own improvised drag act there, as we knew the landlady quite well, and so we re-enacted some sketches we’d done at our parties, added some more, and filmed them on a black and white video camera we had. The novelty of the camera soon wore off, as it had to be attached by a lead to the video recorder, so could not be used outside the room.

We had several routines, and basically made it up as we went along. We were always in drag, and usually I played a lady aristocrat and George played a prostitute, but sometimes we were both old scrubbers or George was a refined Edinburgh ‘Miss Jean Brodie’ type. We made a tape full of these sketches, most featuring both of us, but some solo, and gave a selection of these to the landlady to give her an idea what our act was like.

Unfortunately, by the time we had it all organized and on tape, the pub ceased to be gay, and the couple we knew who ran it moved away to another pub. The new managers wanted to discourage the gay crowd and cater instead for the new Yuppie influx in Battersea, which became ‘South Chelsea’ in Yuppie-speak. The pub too changed its name, several times, and a gay tradition going back before the Second World War was never revived. Apart from a brief experiment at the theater bar of The Latchmere up the road and later a pub in Battersea High Street, neither of which were very successful, there has not been a gay pub in Battersea  since ‘The Cricketers’ went straight.

I was glad we filmed the sketches, and I have often watched them since George died. They still make me and other people laugh, and it is a memento of our happy times together. Indeed, as he lay dying, George got us to re-enact bits of the scrubbers sketch which we had on video, in a brave effort to cheer me up and make me remember the good times we’d shared together. I like to think that via these videos (now transferred to DVD) George and I can still entertain people who may never have met him.

On the last day of May we went on a CND direct action demonstration at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire. It was a blockade of the air base, and George and I both got arrested along with hundreds of others. It was one of the proudest moments of my life, being arrested with George by my side. It showed how close we had grown politically.

A few months later we had to catch an early train to Banbury for the court case. They dealt with everyone very quickly, just a fine each, and I was very proud of George when he stood in the dock. It made us both feel very old when our birth dates were read out and we were both born in the 1940s, whereas most of the others arrested seem to have been born two decades later.

In June there was a General Election, and of course Margaret Thatcher got in again and soon abolished the GLC.

In August we traveled up to Scotland, where we were to stay in Betty’s caravan at Kinghorn. We traveled direct from Victoria to Kirkcaldy in Fife, instead of going by way of Glasgow. In Edinburgh on Sunday 21st we saw the Festival parade through the city, and I remember George pointing out a Polish film actress in Princes’ Gardens below the castle. She had appeared in several of Wojda’s films.

That evening we saw a very weird production of Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage’ which was held in a canteen of some sort, and seemed to consist of teenage women in jeans and sweaters crawling under tables and climbing on chairs whilst reciting the lines of the play and shining torches on each other, since this was the only illumination in the room. The activity took place in and around the audience, who sat at the canteen tables.

In the evening we saw a very late evening production called, appropriately, ‘Sheila Staefel Lately’.  In this one woman show Sheila sung old Victorian melodramatic songs about children dying of consumption and other tragedies, songs very similar to those of the traditional Country Music idiom which I liked.  We loved the performance, but had missed the last train across the Forth Bridge. We had to sit up on the station for an early morning train, and were so tired we both fell asleep and nearly ended up in the Highlands. Fortunately the jolt of the train stopping at Kinghorn woke us up just in time.

On the Tuesday we had a trip to Inverness. It was a nice day out, but it was not as mountainous as I had expected. I always imagined Inverness to be deep in a valley beneath towering peaks, but it was not like that at all, although there were gently curving mountains in the distance.
 

The weather was slightly better this year, as I at least got down to my swimming trunks on Kinghorn beach. A couple of days before returning home paid a visit to Glasgow and George’s cousin, Margaret and her husband. We went back via Edinburgh and caught two more Festival productions, about which I remember nothing at all I’m afraid.

In mid-September we went to a meeting organized by Wandsworth Council to discuss the installation of entry phones and new lifts in our tower block. The council announced they were going to spend a lot of money closing in the open ground floor level, so it could only be accessed by a key or via the entry phone system. Within six months the council had apparently realized how much all this was going to cost and had second thoughts. At any rate they announced there was asbestos in the block, and decanted everybody. 

At further public meetings several people asked to move back into the block after the asbestos had been removed, but the council said it was earmarked as sheltered accommodation for the elderly. This seemed highly unlikely, since a tower block is hardly suitable for such a purpose. In the event it was turned into luxury flats with entry phones, porters, a Jacuzzi,  a sauna, and a sort of penthouse on what was previously the roof. As Jay Court was named after the former Labour MP for the constituency, this was changed to Park South.

Our flat, which we think we saw featured on a local TV news program since it was an 18th floor flat with an identical view to ours, was sold for £150,000. The views of Battersea Park and the more distant Roddy Llewellyn’s Battersea Village restaurant (impossible to see with the naked eye) were advertised to prospective buyers, but not the fact that as soon as you stepped out of the main entrance you were facing the adjacent Doddington Estate, also featured on a local news program as then one of the most notorious estates in London and a mugger’s paradise. The yuppies who moved into our refurbished flats must have been rich pickings. Back in September, though, we naively thought we were going to get the benefits of the planned improvements to our block.

Early in December Quentin Crisp appeared at The Cricketers pub next door to where we lived. From notes in George’s diary it seemed he was in correspondence with Quentin, evidently hoping Quentin would find time to pop up the tower block and see his old friend when he appeared at the pub. I am sure this never happened, at least not whilst I was there. Possibly George got to have a few words with Quentin in private in the pub. During December and over Christmas the pub put on several Christmas shows, including ‘Cinderella’, starring drag acts like Adrella, The Playgirls and Regina Fong. There was also The Playgirls’ Christmas Show, ‘Robin Hood and his Merry Leather Men’ starring Lick, Stick and Promise, and Pip Morgan in ‘Sleeping Princess’. I think we saw most, if not all, of these productions. There was also a camp production called ‘Boys Will Be Girls’ at the Arts Theater Club in December, which we went to see.

Our days at Jay Court were coming to an end, and the block was fast emptying. We didn’t want to delay too long as robberies were becoming more frequent in the half-empty block. So in January 1984 we paid a visit to the Kambala Estate near Clapham Junction to view a council flat we had been offered.

13. KAMBALA ESTATE

Kambala was one of the last council estates to be built in Wandsworth, planned by the last Labour council, and it was a low rise, pleasant estate with gardens and courtyards. We hoped to get a ground floor flat with a garden, but were very disappointed to be told these were reserved for old and disabled people. Of course, I now realize I should have qualified for a ground floor flat because of my disability (a club foot at birth resulting in a fixed ankle, one leg shorter than the other and the need for surgical shoes), but I didn’t think of myself as disabled so it simply didn’t occur to me to mention it. Anyway, we did feel safer upstairs, and less likely to be burgled, especially during our many trips abroad.

We viewed the upstairs flat which we eventually moved into, and although it was a lovely flat, because it didn’t have a garden or even a balcony we refused to accept it at first. George had a strange feeling as he walked around it that unhappy things would occur there – perhaps he sensed that he and several of our cats would die there. Anyway, after initially walking out of the estate office saying we’d have to think about it, we eventually retraced our steps and said we’d take it. I’m sure we did the right thing, as it was an even better flat than we had before, with a huge kitchen and plenty of cupboards.

We got the keys the following week and moved in on a Monday in January 1984. The council were paying for the removal, but the company they used were rather careless and broke our dressing table mirror. Thankfully George and I had packed some of our more delicate things in a shopping trolley, and I walked over to the new flat with the cat. I had to wait ages before George arrived, as he stayed to see the men put everything we wanted to take in the van. We were leaving our old suite and several other things, and buying some new stuff. The council gave us a certain amount of compensation for the inconvenience of the compulsory removal and for some of the resulting expenses.

George arrived, and we waited in the empty flat with no furniture for hours till the removal men finally arrived. They had decided to take a long lunch break right in the middle of our move!

The next few weeks we were busy getting straight, buying carpets and curtains, fixing a bathroom cabinet, etc. It was to be the last home we ever had together, and the best. In the next 7 years, thanks largely to George, we really got it looking nice.

No sooner had we moved into our new flat than we had a visitor from Glasgow. George’s nephew, John, was doing a cookery course at the Hotel Forum in Kensington and paid us a short visit. He had never been to London before, and he and his fellow trainee cooks were wandering around posh Kensington trying in vain to find a ‘fish supper’. Not finding a fish and chip shop they contented themselves with raiding the mini-bars in their rooms, not realizing they had to pay for these drinks before they left.

One Sunday in February we invited Ray and Vic, the landlord and landlady of ‘The Cricketers’, round to lunch to see our new flat and discuss the possibility of our doing a drag show, but they left the pub soon after and it went straight. They’d only been in the pub a year and had really turned it around to one of London’s most popular gay venues. It was a shame they couldn’t stay there, but I believe there were problems with the lease.

George was by now working at Oxfam, a charity which was to be a main part of his life during the next few years. He was really suited to the work, starting off helping out in a shop just off Carnaby Street. He never got full recognition for his efforts, mainly because at the crucial time when he might have been offered a shop manager’s post which could have led to paid employment at Oxfam, he left to go back to the Australian company we had once both worked for. I know he regretted this decision later, but at the time he thought it was for the best.

In March we caught a coach from the Victoria Embankment for a long weekend in Amsterdam. We made so many short visits to Paris and Amsterdam I can’t recall details of individual trips, but we always enjoyed ourselves in these two cities.

We were off on our travels again in mid-May. We caught a double-decker ‘luxury’ coach, complete with hostess, coffee and sandwiches, to the South of France. We traveled by coach and ferry all that day, right through the night, skirting round the center of Paris, and going through Lyon. It was a good job we brought food and drink with us, for we didn’t see any sign of the hostess on the upper deck until the afternoon of the second day, when she tried in vain to sell us sandwiches which by now were quite stale. We’d seen them taken into the coach nice and fresh in London, but the lazy cow had let us starve for 24 hours before she got off her butt and tried to get rid of her stale stock just before arriving at our South of France destination!

When we did arrive it was raining. This more or less set the pattern for the week. Having stayed at George’s sister’s caravan in Scotland a couple of times, we had decided to go on our first foreign caravan holiday. It seemed a cheap way to see the South of France. Our caravan site was in Antibes, and as we trekked across the muddy camp site (which fortunately had paved roads) we discovered our tiny caravan was as far away from the entrance as it could be. Beyond the perimeter hedge alongside the caravan was a country lane.

We had expected a caravan similar to Betty’s, which had a separate bedroom. Instead we squeezed into a tiny space hardly big enough to swing the proverbial cat. When the beds were down there was barely room to move, and the rain on the roof kept us awake for hours. At least we were able to step out on to relatively solid ground, but the caravan opposite seemed to be in the middle of a swamp, and the occupants had to step gingerly on to wooden planks to get to dry land.
 

Despite the bad weather, we enjoyed our holiday. Graham Greene had a home in Antibes, though we never saw it or, indeed, Mr Greene. We caught buses from the site into town, where a train ran conveniently all along the coast into Italy one way, and probably into Spain the other way. Our favorite town in the area was Nice, where we discovered the ‘Flunch’ chain of self-service cafeterias. These were confined to the South of France at the time, but later moved northwards to Paris, and we always used to visit the ‘Flunch’ there too.

We loved self-service restaurants as you could see what you were getting before you ordered, and you didn’t have waiters hovering around you. It was really essential for George, as he was so fussy about what he ate. It was impossible to eat in any place where he couldn’t see and smell the food before ordering. One whiff of onion or garlic and he was likely to be physically sick, and the sight of any kind of sauce, or ‘muck and squalor’ as George so delightfully put it, and he wouldn’t touch the food. The Nice ‘Flunch’ became our second home, so we made daily trips to Nice to visit it. We certainly couldn’t be bothered trying to cook meals in our tiny caravan, so the cafeteria was a Godsend.

Nice itself was a pleasant city with pretty gardens, wide boulevards, fountains, a very wide, long promenade with a stony beach and at one end a high cliff with gardens and a water cascade. The palm trees gave it all an exotic look, even in the rain. There was also an old quarter with steps and narrow winding streets which we liked very much.

We took the train to Cannes, where the film festival was in full swing. This meant, ironically, there wasn’t a film to be seen for the ordinary tourist like us, since all the cinemas had been taken over by the industry, and tickets were unavailable to the general public. We hated Cannes. You could not even go on the sandy beaches since they were all private and mostly attached to hotels. So unimpressed were we with the town, I haven’t got one picture of it in our photo album.

One day we took a train along the coast to Monte Carlo. We spent a lovely day looking round the principality. We saw the palace guard in their strange uniforms outside the palace, and visited the yacht harbor, where George posed with a yachting cap, making out he had a boat moored there. We also found the Casino, and I took George’s photo outside. It was quite a nice day, and eventually we stumbled upon the Monte Carlo beach which amazingly (unlike in Cannes) was a free public beach. It was a lovely bay of soft sand, with palm trees and very few people. I went in for a swim – it was cold, but at least I could say I went swimming in the millionaire’s paradise of Monte Carlo!

We then caught the train again to go further east back into France for a few miles, and then across the border into Italy and the town of Ventimiglia, a haven of cheap booze, especially Italian vermouth. We bought several bottles before catching the train back through Monte Carlo to Antibes.

The longest trip we made was an all day journey by train west to Marseilles, a town George had always wanted to visit since seeing the Marcel Pagnol ‘Marius’ trilogy of films. Once there we visited the waterfront marina, where George again posed in his yachting cap in front of the yachts, and we made the pilgrimage up the big hill to the cathedral overlooking Marseilles and the harbor. Well it certainly felt like a pilgrimage, as it was quite a climb.

We only had a short time in the city, but we liked what we saw, and took a lot of photos. There were some marvelous buildings, sculptures and fountains, and in my album there is a very sexy photo of George wearing a light colored jacket, jeans and a check shirt sitting on a fence in front of the big neo-Classical cascade fountain and sculpture.

Later on in Marseilles we found a little sandy beach, and George sat overlooking it whilst I went for a swim. We also had time to make our way to the head of the harbor, where there was a good view of the city. All too soon it was time to catch the train for the long journey back to Antibes.

Two days later we caught the coach back to London. It had been an interesting trip, despite the poor weather and primitive accommodation, and it gave us a chance to see the French Riviera.  It was not a place we would want to rush back to, though I have called in on the Nice/Monte Carlo area since on cruise ships. Marseilles was perhaps our favorite memory of our stay in Antibes.

In June President Reagan visited London and there were some protests which we certainly sympathized with, if we didn’t participate. I saw his helicopter fly low over Hyde Park as I was swimming at the Lido in the Serpentine one day. Ronnie and Nancy were staying in Battersea House, a 10 minute walk from where we lived. This river-side house was very convenient for Battersea heliport, from which the President could be whisked to any part of London within minutes.

We went on the Gay Pride march at the end of the month, and the weekend after on a sponsored canal walk organized by CND. It was a very long walk indeed, starting somewhere in central London, all along the canal towpaths and the banks of the River Lee to Lea Bridge. George dropped out at Victoria Park and caught the bus back home. 

The August Bank Holiday we spent with our friends Rose and Neil in Hastings, going down Friday and staying till the Monday. The two of them used to go boating on the Norfolk Broads every year, with Neil’s sister, her husband and their son. On one such trip Neil struck up an acquaintance with a woman named Ena, whose family owned a string of pubs and hotels in Norfolk. Ena must have been pretty naive, for she didn’t seem to cotton on that Neil and Rose were a gay couple, even though Rose is the campest creature on Earth.

A romance developed between Ena and Neil, and at one point they were planning to get married. Rose was rather upset by all this naturally, but put it down to a senile phase Neil was going through in his old age. Later Rose and Ena became very good friends.

I think for Neil it was nice to get a bit of attention and to be looked after by Ena. Rose was lazy and would never cook meals or fuss over Neil like Ena did. Of course the fact that Ena’s family owned a string of Norfolk pubs was undoubtedly part of the attraction, and indeed Neil found temporary summer time work in one of the hotels they managed in Great Yarmouth for years after Ena died. They never got married in the end, but I remember going down to Hastings when she was there and they behaved like a couple of love-struck teenagers, chasing each other around the flat.

I can’t remember the first time I met Ena, but it must have been sometime in the early 1980s. I went down to Hastings a day or so before George, and Ena not only refused to call me by my name, she directed all conversation to me via Neil, asking: ‘Would Rose’s gentleman friend like a cup of tea?’ (She used Rose’s real name, not his camp one.)

Of course Ena took over the kitchen completely. She did not seem to mind the mess, putting it down to two men living on their own without a woman’s touch. I can’t remember things improving very much whilst Ena was staying there though, to be honest. When George came down Ena referred to him as ‘Rose’s other gentleman friend’.

George had no time for Ena at all, especially when she insisted on cooking some foul concoction with curry powder in it, which stank the whole flat out. George and I hated curry, so he went into the kitchen to investigate the horrible smell and to tell Ena he couldn’t eat ‘that muck’, but she ordered him out saying: ‘I can’t have men in my kitchen’. Well, it wasn’t her kitchen to start with, and George soon put her right about the gender question.

Ena had a horrible dog called Becky which snapped and barked whenever anyone came near. Ena used to say: ‘She doesn’t like men.’ George decided to put Ena straight, so in response to one of these remarks about men he replied: ‘There’s no men in this flat, haven’t you worked that out yet dear?’ This seem to perplex her, but George soon made sure she got the message. He sent Rose a very camp card on his birthday which could leave Ena in no doubt Rose was gay, and she apparently broke down in tears and said she didn’t want to come between Rose and Neil or spoil their relationship. I think that is probably the moment they all agreed to remain just good friends, and Rose’s relationship with Ena took a turn for the better. She became very ill soon afterwards, and eventually died. Rose took great care of her in the last days, visiting her at the hospital in Norfolk. He seemed to take more care of her than her own family did, and after she died tended the rather neglected grave whenever he went up to Norfolk.

On this particular visit I can’t remember if Ena was there, but whenever she was she would change her dress about three times a day. She and Neil would get up, then she’d change to go to the pub for a lunchtime drink, change again when she got back, and change again to go to another pub in the evening. She wore a lot of make-up, and had her hair in ringlets. George said she looked like Bette Davis in ‘Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?’ and he wasn’t far off the mark.

In October I went up to Barrow-in-Furness for a national CND demonstration against Trident and December saw us on a demonstration and march to the Soviet embassy, and also at a rally in Trafalgar Square marking the anniversary of the arrival of Cruise missiles in the UK. Another year came to a close, this time without a New Year’s Eve party.

We were pretty active in this second big phase of CND which coincided with Maggie Thatcher’s premiership and the arrival of Cruise missiles.  Early in the New Year we went on a CND vigil outside the Belgian embassy. CND seemed pretty active that month as we also went on an anti-Cruise vigil on Clapham Common and helped out at a local CND jumble sale. Even at the annual Easter Parade in Battersea Park, which we attended, the local CND had a stall.

In mid April we were off to Portugal for the first time, with my mother. We were to spend a week on the Atlantic Coast at Estoril, a short train ride from the capital, Lisbon.

It was only a moderately successful week, mainly because the weather was rather dull and overcast with some rain, a fact my mother never let us forget. We were all sharing a room in the hotel (to save money) and very early in the morning my mother would wake us up by trying to creep to the French windows leading out to our large balcony overlooking the sea, in order to open them up and have a cigarette. Every morning she seemed to trip over something in the semi darkness and exclaim ‘Oh shit’, which woke us both up. We then pretended to be asleep hoping she would keep quiet, but it was always the same routine. She would open the curtains and window, light up her cigarette and say: ‘Cloudy again, duck. Don’t think we’ll see the sun today.’

It was like an accusation: ‘You’ve brought me all the way out here when I’d have been happier in Margate. Where’s all this sun they are supposed to have in Portugal?’ Perhaps it wasn’t meant that way, but that’s how it came across to us, and it was most annoying. The last thing we wanted to know at 7 a.m. in the morning was that it wasn’t worth getting up because the weather was so horrible.

Of course, most people holiday on the Algarve in the South of Portugal, but the Atlantic coast is always cooler. Also, April is very early in the year to expect summer weather. However, we were very near Lisbon and could catch a train just across the road, so we made several trips there and enjoyed exploring a new capital city.

One thing which surprised us were the number of beggars about – it was almost like being in a Third World country. Yet the main streets were paved with very ornate tiles which gave them an affluent look. In the central area was an old iron tower housing a lift which led up to an observation platform and a high level walkway, which was unusual. Otherwise Lisbon was a typical Continental capital, with its streetcars, large squares, and an old district of narrow winding streets called Alfama. There was also an area called Belem which had quite an impressive monument to sailors on the waterfront, and on the way into Lisbon by train you passed under an impressive suspension bridge across the river, and on the far side could be seen a smaller-scale replica of the huge statue of Christ which overlooks Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

Whilst in Portugal we paid a visit to Sintra, an old town set on a hill inland, which is very picturesque. Tourist buses go there, but we made our way by local bus which was much more interesting and a lot cheaper.

Estoril itself wasn’t much to write home about. It had a large casino, but not much else. We were staying on a bed and breakfast basis, and it was cheaper to eat out than in the hotel. My mother rather irritated us by eating in the hotel several times rather than be bothered looking for cheaper places with us. When she did eat with us at a restaurant she was sometimes acutely embarrassing. We found a reasonable place overlooking the main gardens by the casino, and as it was fairly good weather that day we had our meal at a table outside.

As the waiter put a cloth on the table my mother exclaimed: ‘Oooh!’, like a little girl excited at the sight of a tablecloth, and then tried to speak to the waiter in, of all things, Greek! (She only spoke a few words of the language herself.) We told her it’s no use speaking Greek to a Portuguese waiter, but she just said she kept forgetting.  (Foreigners were associated in her mind with her husband’s friends and relations.)

She then asked us how much we should tip the waiter, but as this was early on in the holiday we hadn’t yet gotten used to the local currency, so she tried to ask the waiter how much the various coins were worth. It was quite farcical, an English woman trying to ask in English and Greek what Portuguese coins were worth in English currency to a waiter who only spoke Portuguese. As the young man smiled sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders to indicate he didn’t understand what she was on about, my mother finally had to admit defeat and give up. After that we didn’t try too hard to dissuade her if she decided to eat by herself in the hotel.

There was a lovely little town a few kilometers from Estoril, one station down the line in the opposite direction from Lisbon. It was a fishing village called Cascais, full of picturesque streets with whitewashed houses and shops. We spent some nice days there, and saw an open air Festival in one of the little squares in honor of the Portuguese revolution overthrowing the Salazar dictatorship. We also found a very good little cafe in Cascais where we all ate on several occasions.

There was a big shopping mall in Estoril which included a cinema complex, and I remember George and my mother electing to go and see ‘Amadeus’, the film about Mozart. Since this didn’t appeal to me I went in one of the other cinemas and saw something else. Afterwards we met and had a huge ice cream sundae each in the complex whilst discussing the films we had seen.
 

The last day of our holiday was beautiful weather, so we headed down for the beach thinking at least my mother couldn’t grumble about this day. We were wrong. She embarrassed us more than ever by stripping off down to her petticoat (why on Earth didn’t she wear her bathing costume, like she usually did on beach holidays?) Not content with this exhibitionism, she insisted on putting up her black umbrella to use as a sunshade. This was the first real sun we had seen in our week’s holiday, and she had been moaning about no sun all week, yet there she was sitting in the shade against a wall in her pink petticoat under a black umbrella grumbling: ‘Too bloody hot’ over and over again. We just couldn’t win, and swore never to take her on holiday again.

Poor George, no wonder his relationship with my mother was always strained. It was the classic ‘mother-in-law’ situation only worse, since George knew my mother resented George being a man. She had always wanted me to marry a girl and give her some grandchildren. Although my mother said she accepted George, and knew how much he had helped me and was good for me, making me a much more well-adjusted and less bitter person, there was always that unspoken resentment that George was not my wife or the mother of my children, and never could be.

We flew back to London on the Friday. It had been an interesting holiday to a new country, but spoiled by the weather and my mother’s rather silly behavior. In later years we laughed at the whole situation, but it caused tension at the time. No wonder George gave my mother the nickname ‘Mum Grouch’. Apart from her moaning, it annoyed him immensely that an intelligent woman should put on this ‘silly little girl’ or ‘senile dementia’ act, but somehow holidays abroad always brought out this eccentric behavior which never happened at home.

 During that Spring we visited Battersea Park several times, where the Buddhist Peace Pagoda was inaugurated on May 14th. I went along to that alone, but while they were still building the Pagoda George and I visited the Buddhist nuns who lived in the park, and gave them a very modest present of some fruit. They were embarrassingly grateful and kept bowing, so we had to keep bowing back, and then to our horror they invited us into a temple-like room with a statue of the Buddha at one end and incense burning, and George and I had to kneel before this ‘golden idol’ with our little bag of fruit as if it were some sacrificial offering. The nuns and monks looking after the Pagoda relied on donations such as ours, but we didn’t expect to have to offer them up to the Buddha first for his blessing. All this Eastern mysticism was hidden away in a little hut behind some bushes in Battersea Park.

In late August I finished working at Austral Development after about ten years, the longest I had ever stayed in one job. George was to take over from me working with our friend Angel on alternate shifts, as he thought it would enable him to catch up with telex technology, a field he hadn’t worked in for a year or so. The job wasn’t to last, as the firm was on its last legs. We both knew that, and it was the reason I was leaving and taking a part-time job at Amnesty International at slightly less money. It proved to be a very good move for myself, as the money at AI soon went up to way above what I could get per hour anywhere else, but not such a good move for George. He felt later if he’d stayed with Oxfam he would have got a permanent paid job very soon, as he was already a successful voluntary shop leader. But in the end it was his decision to go back to Austral and so end a long period of unemployment.

The day after I left Austral we were off to Scotland. During our week’s stay we visited Edinburgh, and went on a one day trip to the Highlands by train, visiting places like Oban (which had a sort of mini-Coliseum) and Fort William. Whilst in Glasgow we paid a visit to the Citizen’s Theatre to see a production.

We both started our new jobs on Monday September 2nd, George at Austral Development and myself at Amnesty International. Both of us had worked at these places in the past. Since George had left AI they had moved from Covent Garden to bigger premises at Mount Pleasant. I knew quite a few of the people from when I worked there before on a part-time basis, and also people George had introduced me to at parties and theater visits.

There was a sit-down blockade at Molesworth Cruise missile base that month, the ground was covered in snow and I slipped and fell. Later, on the sit-down demo, I ate my sandwiches and was about to drink a cup of soup from my flask, when I realized the little bits floating in it were shivers of broken glass from inside the flask, which had apparently shattered when I fell, though there was no way of knowing this looking at the outside of the flask. I had a narrow and lucky escape from serious internal injury. George had stayed home for this demo.

In early March we were off to Paris for four days, a long weekend. We went with Rose by train and Hovercraft, and stayed in a little Vietnamese-owned hotel near the Eiffel Tower. We had a great time, and Rose really enjoyed it. It may well have been his first trip abroad, and certainly it was his first to Paris. George in particular enjoyed showing his oldest friend around the city he loved so much, and where he had lived for several months in the 1960s.

We visited all the usual tourist sights and Oscar Wilde’s grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery, where of course we also visited Edith Piaf’s plot. Our hotel room was rather sleazy, as so often with small Paris hotels, but we loved it. The washing area was screened off by a little partition with an archway, and the walls were covered with pink floral paper. It was quite homely in a way, and we sat in there and ate snacks consisting of French bread, sardines and bottles of duty-free gin.

No sooner were we back from Paris than we were off to Amsterdam in March for a weekend. I can’t recall the details as we went so many times.

Significantly that Spring we attended a play about AIDS and later watched an AIDS movie on TV called ‘An Early Frost’. George remarked in his diary that the TV play was ‘very good’. In later years he would turn the TV off or to another channel when AIDS was mentioned, and in retrospect I can see he was OK with AIDS plays, films and TV programs until he started to develop possible symptoms (recurrent mouth ulcers) of HIV himself around mid-1988.

At the end of the month we were off on our first visit to Yugoslavia.  We flew to Dubrovnik on Saturday June 28th, and next day set off on a coach tour of the country which was to last a week. Traveling up coast and then inland, we left Croatia and entered Bosnia-Hercegovina where we visited Mostar with its ancient arched bridge (since destroyed then rebuilt). We crossed this and went inside what they called a ‘Turkish’ house, which was a Muslim dwelling open to visitors.

Next stop was Sarajevo where we stayed in a skyscraper hotel in a wide boulevard. A tremendous dramatic thunderstorm brew up the night we arrived, perhaps symbolic of the turmoil to come to that ill-fated city.

It was here in the Sarajevo hotel that our Slovenian courier, Paul, made his move. He invited us to join him at his table for dinner. Afterwards we had drinks in the bar, and he invited us up to his room for more drinks and… well, it was pretty obvious by then what he was after. This is where George’s problems came to the fore. Whether or not he fancied Paul, he just could not respond to his advances at all without amphetamines, and he had none with him on this trip. The result was he got into a blind panic, and just could not cope with the situation. He had one drink in Paul’s room and then made his excuses and left.

Paul was reasonably good-looking but certainly not the dream courier one might have fantasies about scoring with. However, I felt we had led him along a bit, or allowed him to lead us on, and accepted his drinks, etc., and we had many days to go with him on the trip. I did not feel I too could make my excuses and leave. George had said to me he didn’t mind if I stayed, so Paul and myself had a little session and then I left to join George for the night. I had to try and explain George’s behavior to Paul, and the best I could think of was that he wasn’t very well and wasn’t in the mood. Both were the wrong thing to say, because next day as we boarded the coach Paul asked George how he felt today and if he was in ‘a better mood’. He was definitely interested in scoring with George, and I got the feeling it was him rather than me Paul was really after. For George in his later years, however, it was strictly a case of ‘no sweeties, no sex’ and it was as frustrating for him as for those who had desires on him. So those few minutes with Paul were the only sex I had myself during the holiday.

Next day we visited the center of the city, including a museum near the spot where the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand took place which sparked the First World War. The actual street corner where this happened was pointed out to us. We then went on to Banja Luka for our overnight stay, stopping en route in Jajce where there was an impressive waterfall. We had a quick look round the shops in Banja Luka that night, but we were off quite early headed for the Croatian capital.

Zagreb was a very European city after Muslim Mostar and Sarajevo, with an impressive twin-spired Gothic cathedral, and a delightful church with a Central/East European type spire (like a squashed onion) and colorful mosaics on its sloping roof, visible from the street, depicting various coats-of-arms. There was also a big square ablaze with neon signs at night, and full of cafe tables and people by day. We stayed at a very up market hotel in Zagreb, the Inter-Continental (part of the Western chain).

Next stop on our itinerary was Ljubljana in Slovenia, and the city where our courier, Paul, had been to University. We only had an hour or two there, but what we saw of it was very attractive. There was a beautiful bridge over the river, a fortress on a hill overlooking the city and plenty of big shops.

For our overnight stop we stayed in a rural setting in Postojna, where there are some very deep caves. The hotel was set by a weir on a river, and was also right next to the cave system, which of course we visited. The only thing I can remember is how very cold they were, and how warm it felt when we came back into the sunshine.

Bypassing the center of Rijeka, then the main northern port of Yugoslavia, we headed inland again for the Plitvice area for our overnight stay. This was really the highlight of the coach tour for me, a beautiful rural park full of waterfalls, lakes and woods. I swam in the lake, and we went on a kind of nature land trail part of which crossed the lakes on floating bridges consisting of a footpath made of planks literally floating on the water. It was the most beautiful place in our entire trip, which had included some breathtaking scenery. Imagine how sad I was years after George died to read of the bloodshed that had taken place right there in Plitvice amidst all that natural beauty. For me, however, it remains a tranquil place of beauty and peace in a wonderful, united, Socialist country called Yugoslavia where I spent three happy holidays.

Our next stop was Zadar, an ancient town on the coast with some old Roman-type remains by an unusual circular building next to a five-story spire. We had a meal in a restaurant overlooking the marina.

Further down the coast we stopped in Trogir, a very picturesque town with palm trees lining the promenade, and a fortress, clock tower and some other impressive buildings.

Our next overnight stop was in Split, in a modern hotel overlooking the harbor. We fell in love with Split, and may well have paid another visit there sometime had George’s death and the civil war not intervened. One disadvantage over Dubrovnik, however, was the apparent lack of good, accessible beaches in the town itself.

It was a very interesting city indeed. The old part of the town was a hodgepodge of architecture from different eras. Relatively modern buildings had been erected literally on top of much older walls, beneath which were dungeons or catacombs. Inside the ancient walled city were some old ruins and columns, and mushrooming between these were the colorful umbrellas of a street market. There were little narrow winding streets, which opened up into open piazzas and irregularly shaped ‘squares’. One in particular which had cafe tables set out we stopped at several times for drinks.

It was in Split we discovered Mestrovic, a local sculptor whose statue of a religious figure dominated some gardens just outside the city wall.  There was an art gallery dedicated to his work, and we enjoyed it immensely. He had a unique style, specializing in impressive, heavy, solid Slavic figures, some in almost surrealist postures. We liked his work so much we bought a white figurine depicting one of Mestrovic’s works on display in the gallery, a peasant woman in a headscarf, kneeling on one knee with her hands clasped over her ears. The sculpture is entitled ‘Despair’. It was prophetic of the times to come in that beautiful, troubled land. All this symbolism was lost on George’s sister when she visited from Glasgow one time, saw the peasant woman ornament and commented: ‘That woman looks as if she’s got a sore heed.’

We arrived back in Dubrovnik at the end of our coach tour and said farewell to Paul, our courier, before moving into our hotel for our week’s stay in the city.

It seemed Dubrovnik had everything. An ancient walled city which was perhaps the best preserved anywhere in the world. Also many excellent beaches, and a hill with a cable car overlooking the Old Town. Also an island just offshore, easy to reach by boat. We explored all these during our stay.

The Dubrovnik Festival was on whilst we were there, and we attended the opening ceremony which was held after dark and consisted of a procession in medieval costume. There was also a very impressive firework display which we watched from the walls of the Old City overlooking the sea.

The Old Town within the walls contained one long, wide pedestrian street (motor vehicles are banned from the Old Town) lined with shops and with a clock tower at one end. Just off this street in a maze of narrow alleys was a self-service restaurant we visited nearly every day. We called it Madame Tito’s after a nice woman who worked there under the obligatory portrait of Marshal Tito.

We loved exploring the alleyways, and because the town was built on different levels, many of these narrow streets were very steep, with flights of steps. The buildings were very close together, and there was plenty of foliage in the narrow streets. There were also tranquil courtyards with palm trees and other plants.

We walked right around the city walls, which give beautiful views of the tiled-roofed Old Town, the sea and islands and the mountain behind (from which the Serbs later shelled the ancient city, but thankfully did little damage apparently).

The main entrance to the Old Town was by way of an arch and drawbridge, and this led to the main square from which the local buses left. The other side of the Old Town we discovered a little beach, which was very convenient when you wanted to relax after walking round the hot cobbled streets.

Whilst in Dubrovnik I bought a snorkel and mask and discovered for the first time a whole new dimension beneath the sea in the crystal clear waters of the Adriatic, which are excellent for this activity, the fauna, rock formations and fish being so interesting and abundant.

We also visited a beach further out of town near the main tourist hotels. This gave the impression of being on a lake, because the sea inlet here was surrounded by mountains. It was like a tropical version of the Scottish lochs or English lake district. This was the Babin Kuk area of Dubrovnik. We also visited the nearby island, mainly covered with trees, and I had a swim in the sea there too, and in a little pond on the island.

We went up in the cable car and from the mountain top had a breathtaking view of the Old Town, harbor and the island. Also of the modern town beyond the city walls.

Whilst staying in Dubrovnik we went by bus to the nearby town of Cavtat, where there is a mausoleum set on a hill jutting out to sea. You can walk all round the peninsular in about half an hour, which has a rocky beach good for swimming and snorkeling. Cavtat was also an attractive little town, with narrow streets and pleasant pavement cafes, and it was also surrounded by mountains, making it very picturesque.

On Saturday July 12th we returned to London, having packed an awful lot into those two weeks. We had seen most of Yugoslavia, but strangely Serbia and the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade had been omitted from this, and most other, tours of the country. We certainly enjoyed what we saw very much, and decided to go back again the following year.

I have returned to Dubrovnik and Split with my mother on a cruise ship in the early 21^st Century, and though they hadn’t physically changed much, of course politically they are very different. No longer in Yugoslavia, no longer Socialist, and no longer using the dinar but some stupid local currency nobody has ever heard of. I upset the waitress, who accepted our Euros, by asking what the local currency was and what was wrong with the Yugoslav dinar! Or indeed the Euro, since Croatia was now in the EU. I just can’t get used to the post-Communist era in these countries, and missed the Red Star on the local red, white and blue tricolor flags.

The following March we departed Gatwick early in the morning bound for Gibraltar and a tour of Southern Spain, with possibly our first visit to North Africa thrown in.

We caught an early morning flight from Gatwick and arrived at the very unusual Gibraltar airport, on a narrow isthmus between Spain and The Rock, about midday. The sun was shining and we were in for a very pleasant surprise as we were driven, not into Gibraltar town itself, but to the other side of The Rock and a little village called Catalan Bay. This consisted of a few houses, shops, bars, a little church and a quite big hotel, plus a sandy beach. Our hotel was right next to the beach, and I well remember going in the sea for a swim the day we arrived, March 1st. The sea was cold, but I enjoyed it all the more because we just never expected to be anywhere near a beach on this touring holiday, and certainly did not expect this hot sunshine so early in the year.

Next day we were hoping to take a one day trip to Tangier in Morocco, just across the Straits, as advertised in the holiday brochure. However, at the welcoming party the night before they announced that for some reason the trip was off, so George and I never got to step foot on the African continent together. Instead we spent more time on the beach. There weren’t that many tourists, but quite a few young lads were loafing around in jeans and Union Jack t-shirts, obviously from the British military bases on the other side of The Rock.

The bars were full of them too, and no wonder. Drinks, especially spirits, were ridiculously cheap. George and I knocked back the gin and tonics like there was no tomorrow.

We did a tour of The Rock that day too, through Gibraltar town and right up to Europa Point to view the Pillars of Hercules. These are two mountains, The Rock of Gibraltar itself and another mountain in Morocco, which stand each side of the Straits of Gibraltar, one ‘pillar’ in Europe and the other in Africa. Through the heat haze we could just make out the mountain on the other side, the only time George and I glimpsed the African continent together.

There was a cable car from Gibraltar town up to the top of The Rock, but we went by road in the coach, and halfway up The Rock alongside the road we encountered the famous Barbary Apes roaming around free as birds. Rumor has it that when they disappear or die off, the British will leave Gibraltar. The coach then drove on to some excavations in The Rock, which we explored on foot. These caves led right through to the other side, and there were observation points looking out across the airport towards Spain. Of course all these were used as fortifications in the Second World War.

We also spent some time walking around Gibraltar town, getting a little bus in from Catalan Bay. It was an eerie experience seeing shops you would find in any British high street, red pillar boxes and British police uniforms in a Mediterranean climate. It felt like being on the Isle of Wight or somewhere very close to home, but it also didn’t seem right to us and smacked of colonialism. ( I visited Gibraltar again with my mother on a cruise in 2009.)

Next day we set off in the coach across the airport runway, which transversed the main road from Gibraltar into Spain. Luckily there seem to be few collisions between planes and road traffic as people tend to obey the lights and gates of this unique level crossing. We crossed the border into Spain and headed for Seville by way of Jerez, famous for its namesake, sherry.

We of course stopped in Jerez and visited the Sandemann’s sherry distillery, where we saw the process and had a good sample of the product. We sat at long tables where bottles and glasses were placed at our disposal. George remarked afterwards how all those people with phony posh accents gradually lost them as they drank more sherry, till they were laughing and joking in working class dialects like the rest of us, betraying their true origins. He really enjoyed this observation as much as the sherry itself.

We then pressed on to Seville (famous for its oranges and the opera ‘Carmen’) for our two night stay. As soon as we reached Seville we saw orange trees full of fruit lining the streets. We were told they were bitter and only fit for marmalade, but whether this was just a tale told to tourists to stop the trees being stripped bare I can’t say.

Our time in Seville was marred by George’s face swelling up alarmingly around the eyes. We went to a local pharmacist in Seville, and the assistant diagnosed acute sunburn. Lying out in that hot Gibraltar sunshine after coming straight from an English winter had caused George’s face to react in this way. The pharmacist prescribed some cream which George applied, and by the time we left Seville his face was going back to normal.

Despite George’s trouble and difficulty seeing clearly because of it, we explored the city, including the mosaics of Spanish Square, the buildings of Americas Square, the cathedral and the old streets around it. We also visited an orange grove in the Alcazar area.

On the Thursday we set off in the coach for Cordoba, stopping on the way in Ejica which also had a very big church or cathedral by the main square, which was full of locals standing or sitting around chatting and enjoying the sun.

We arrived in Cordoba where we were spending one night. It had a river, some narrow winding streets and a huge mosque, part of which had been converted into a Catholic cathedral. We were amazed at the sheer size of the mosque, the columns of which gave us the impression of being in a petrified forest. Some were very ornate and made of colored marble. Suddenly and rather disconcertingly you came into a very ornate Christian cathedral, completely at odds with the Moorish architecture of the rest of the building. From the outside the Christian bell tower dominated the mosque. It had been built around the mosque’s original minaret. Of course it was both religious and architectural sacrilege, with the result that the Cordoba mosque was neither one thing nor the other, but the Christian alterations had been done a long time ago so were themselves of some historical interest.

On the Friday we set off for Granada, dominated by the famous Alhambra high on a hill overlooking the city. We visited this palace, but were a little disappointed with it as it seemed rather plain.

We enjoyed exploring the city, and found a quiet area with a little stream running through it, as well as the main squares and big shops.

Our hotel room had a balcony, and we sat out there in the sunshine with snow-capped mountains in the background. We were taken up these mountains in the coach and visited the ski resort at the top. We watched the skiers piling into the cable cars and skiing down again. It was quite a new experience for us, but we didn’t feel tempted to have a go ourselves.

We drove back to Gibraltar via the coast and dreadful places like Torremolinos and Fuengirola. It think it was at the latter resort we stopped for breakfast at a huge hotel where you had to line up in separate queues for tea and coffee, toast, and boiled eggs. It was like the feeding of the 5,000, and this mass catering and the gray skyscraper slabs that dominated the resorts confirmed that we were right to avoid them like the plague, choosing the architecturally purer resorts of the Costa Brava instead. Llorret de Mar certainly had its share of tourist hotels and nightlife, but still looked and felt like a Catalan town, with only one building which could be described as a small ‘skyscraper’. Torremolinos and Fuengirola were just huge tourist resorts with nothing but skyscraper hotels, tourist shops and bars and apparently not a scrap of Spanish culture to be seen.

We arrived at the airport in Gibraltar with plenty of time to spare for our flight home, and whereas in most airports this is a boring time locked up in the departure area, with only the duty free shop to console you, here in Gibraltar we were free to stroll out of the terminal building, walk across the runway on the main road and go into Gibraltar town. We didn’t venture too far, but stopped at a Wimpy bar and had a snack and a drink before wandering leisurely back to the airport. Our fellow passengers were amazed when we told them we had strolled into town for a snack, whilst they had been huddled round the airport bar afraid to wander even out of the airport building.

We flew back home arriving in the early afternoon of Sunday, and as we arrived back in the depths of winter I could hardly believe I had been swimming in the Mediterranean just a week before, or that George had gotten badly sunburnt lying on the beach.

In late April I was off to Cyprus for a week with my mother.  George didn’t want to come, as he felt the island had little attraction for him. I strongly suspect a letter my father had once written about it not being a good idea my coming to Cyprus with my boyfriend had a lot to do with it.

My father had met George and got on well with him, even telling me he was very good for me. He knew the score back then, but later word had apparently gotten round his village in Cyprus that I was gay, which was beyond the pale in that society. I angrily told my dad I’d bring who I liked, and if the villagers knew I was gay he must have told them himself, which he admitted was true. That argument had been years before, but understandably George felt uncomfortable about coming with us. Anyway, after previous experiences on holiday with my mother, especially the recent Portuguese trip, George was quite happy to let me go on my second visit to Cyprus with her whilst he stayed at home.

My mother had never visited Cyprus although my dad was Greek-Cypriot. Plans to visit had fallen by the wayside for various reasons, not least their separation in 1951 and all that led up to it. The separation had, in fact, been precipitated by a planned visit to Cyprus. A friend told my mum that the holiday in Cyprus planned for the family in that year would be a one-way trip for my brother and myself, as my dad intended to bring us up in Cyprus so hadn’t bought us return tickets.

It was a pity my mother hadn’t come with me to Cyprus ten years earlier as my dad’s mother longed to meet her, and sadly died shortly after my first visit. They had corresponded by letter years before, my mother reporting to my grandmother the progress of my various operations as a child. Now my grandmother was gone so was one of the main motivations for my mother visiting Cyprus, so I think she embarked on the trip with mixed feelings.

She had only sporadic contact with my dad in the preceding 36 years, and while part of her wanted to see Cyprus and places she had heard about, part of her was very apprehensive.

We arrived to atrocious weather, which kept up half the week we were there. We stayed at a little hotel in Kato Paphos, a few blocks from the house where my dad lived with his former business partner and common law wife, Helen. We had a meal there once, and Helen tried to make my mother feel welcome, though she speaks very little English and my mother very little Greek. Needless to say the atmosphere was strained.

My dad lent me his car for the week, and I soon got the hang of driving again. We visited the Tombs of the Kings and mosaics in the Paphos area, and then I took my mum into the Troodos mountains. I had decided to take this more scenic route to Nicosia, the capital, but it proved disastrous because of the torrential rain.
 

We could see very little scenery because of the weather, and my mother was terrified by the hairpin bends on mountainous roads too narrow in most places for two cars to pass, with a sheer drop on one side. We reached the tomb of Archbishop Makarios high on a mountain and I got out of the car and ran several hundred yards in pouring rain to visit it, but my mum stayed in the car. She said later she thought she might be stranded there forever, and had visions of me stumbling and falling off the mountain in the downpour.

I came back drenched, and we carried on. The roads got steadily worse and became rough mud tracks. We came across a Greek-Cypriot family whose car had broken down and was stuck in the mud. They spoke not a word of English, but they made quite clear they wanted a lift to Nicosia. As few cars were likely to be taking this route in such terrible conditions we could hardly refuse, and anyway we thought they could help with directions.

The man stayed with his car whilst an elderly woman in black and presumably her daughter sat in the back and helped direct us. We entered Nicosia by a totally unfamiliar route to me, and suddenly the two women demanded to be let out. We dropped them off to find we were heading straight for the Turkish sector, so no wonder they were in such a hurry to get out. We turned right to avoid the checkpoint and eventually I managed to find my dad’s block of flats. He had given me the keys to stay a couple of nights.

We got in to find there was no food in the place and we couldn’t get the stove working, so we ate in a nearby cafe. I managed to get the TV working, and left my mum watching that whilst I took a quick drive downtown. I just wanted to check out the sunken gardens by the walls of the Old Town to see if the gay scene I had discovered ten years before was still thriving. It wasn’t – there had obviously been a big clean-up and not a soul was about even though the weather in Nicosia was dry (we’d left the rain back in the mountains).
 

I drove back to the flat, we watched a bit of TV and then went to bed. My mother refused to sleep in the big bedroom because she said it stunk of Helen’s scent, so I slept there and she had the smaller room.

Next day I drove my mother into Nicosia and we walked around the shops and the Old Town. Her shoes were hurting her, so we went into a shoe shop in the Old Town and bought some comfortable sandals. I remember feeling very embarrassed because as she took her shoes off her feet were black, but the shop assistant didn’t bat an eyelid. I don’t know if it was dirt from the streets or dye from her shoes, probably the latter in that heat.

We walked on up to the Green Line and looked into the UN Zone and the Turkish quarter beyond. Later we tried, as long planned, to visit that part of Nicosia which is the capital of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but I made a fatal mistake and we were refused entry. 

Ten years before I had visited the Turkish part of Nicosia in what was then known as the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus. I had followed my dad’s instructions and stated that my father was English. This time I forgot, and as we entered the customs office on the Turkish side they asked one of us to fill in a form. If my mother had filled it in there would have been no problem, as only one in each party had do so, and only the person actually filling in the form had to state the nationality of his or her parents. My mother’s parents were both English.
 

However my mother left the form for me to fill in, and foolishly I wrote that my dad was Greek-Cypriot. So, although we both had British passports, they wouldn’t let us in. Before leaving for Cyprus I had even been to the London travel office of the TRNC, which doubles as an unofficial ‘embassy’, and spoken to a high ranking official about my forthcoming visit and tried to get a visa in advance. I had told him my father was Greek-Cypriot, but that I was very sympathetic to the Turkish-Cypriots and thought the Greeks were to blame for the current situation. Even then it didn’t occur to me I was saying all the wrong things. I should have just walked up to the border and gone in as a British tourist like anyone else. The London official simply told me to apply for a visa at the border post.

That’s what comes of being a total outsider to the Turkish/Greek Cypriot mentalities of mutual distrust and hatred – being British I just accepted two equal Cypriot republics even if one was only recognized by Turkey, and didn’t realize the Turkish side had every reason to be suspicious of Greek-Cypriots trying to enter their zone. Since then the regulations were altered to allow non-Cypriot citizens with Greek-Cypriot parentage to visit the TRNC at their discretion.  On a later visit I was not even asked any awkward questions before being granted a visa. Later still in 2003 the borders were opened to most Cypriots living in Cyprus to visit the other republic, nearly 29 years after the closed border came into existence (although even before this Turkish Cypriots could unofficially slip into the Greek-Cypriot republic via a Turkish-Cypriot border post adjacent to the British Dhekelia sovereign base. The Greek-Cypriots had no jurisdiction at this border post. No Greek-Cypriot citizens could enter the Turkish-Cypriot republic before 2003 except on a few special occasions.)  In 2009 on a return visit I was pleased to see the borders between the two Cypriot republics were so easy to cross for everybody, including Cypriots. Just show your passport as you walk through the various checkpoints. We went on coach trips to both republics, crossing the Green Line without even showing our passports.

In 1987 my mother and myself took the fast motorway back to Paphos by way of Limassol, and on the way stopped off at Kolossi Castle and the ancient theater at Curium. We also stopped at a beach by Aphrodites’ birthplace and I went in for a dip, and nearly got my neck broken by the force of the huge waves which threw me right over.

Later in the week I took my mum up into the mountains again so she could appreciate their beauty in fine weather. We also visited Aphrodites’ Baths on the northwestern tip of Cyprus, stopping at Coral Bay on the way. This had been a deserted golden sandy beach ten years before, but was now packed with tourists. An airport had been built in the Paphos area in the intervening years which had totally altered the nature of Paphos itself and the surrounding area. Ten years before Kato (Lower) Paphos had been a little fishing town with a quiet harbor, but it was now full of discos, restaurants, hotels and was almost indistinguishable from Mediterranean resorts in Spain and elsewhere.

After visiting Aphrodites’ Baths, which is a little grotto with water running down into a pool, we visited my Uncle Filaktis and his second wife, Marie, in Polis. This was a very happy visit as my mum got on well with my dad’s brother. Sadly he died of a heart attack shortly after our visit, and his wife was heartbroken. She was in ill health herself with cancer and died a few years later.

We also visited other relations whilst in Cyprus, such as my dad’s other brother, Costas. His sister, Athena, was visiting her daughters in England at the time, but we visited her house and saw her husband Michael. My mum knew both of them as they had lived in London for many years. The house where they lived was the one where my father had been born, so this must have been as interesting for my mum as it was for me, even though the house had been altered quite a bit since then, although it was still very basic compared to many other houses in the village. It had no electricity, plumbing or sanitation before the War, and I think my mum was quite surprised after all the horror stories she had heard from Filaktis’ first wife about having to dig a hole in the field to go to the toilet, and sleeping on straw with the animals to find the house now had all these modern facilities (though only an outside flush toilet, no bathroom, and hot water only from a tap in the basement area. The house has since been fully modernized, I’m told, though I didn’t have an opportunity to visit in 2009, just passed it in a taxi.)

Whilst in the village we visited my grandparents’ grave, and were both shocked at the neglected state of it, and the fact that my poor grandmother had been interred with my grandfather (who had been the local priest) but nobody had bothered to alter the inscription to indicate she was also buried there. Such is the position of women in rural Greek-Cypriot society, even in death they are completely overshadowed by their husbands, though an inscription with her name was later added.

I must relate one other story about our visit to Cyprus. My father decided to take us for a day out, and he drove us to some monastery in the mountains. Now my dad has never been a religious man. He has had strong connexions with the Greek Orthodox Church both in London and Cyprus, giving lots of money to it and serving on committees, but at the same time he was an avowed atheist. The Church is a political as well as a religious animal in Cyprus, and my father used it to win influence, giving it money publicly whilst decrying its riches in private.

This hypocrisy was demonstrated when we all walked into a little church by the monastery, and my dad made a big show of crossing himself several times, and then kissing every icon in the church.

This was never part of the culture of myself or my mother. True I was christened in a Greek Orthodox cathedral in London, but we had always attended either the Anglican or Methodist churches as children.

My father was in a furious temper as we drove back. He picked on me, ignoring my mother’s similar misdemeanor, and accused me of entering the church like a tourist, with my hands clasped behind my back. He also said my brother and his wife were just as bad, which I suppose was some consolation.

We flew back home the first week in May. The weather had been much better the second half of the week, and I think on the whole my mother enjoyed the holiday and was glad we went. I had phoned George once or twice from the hotel in Paphos, but was so glad to see him again after our week apart.       

In early July George and myself set off on our second visit to Yugoslavia, this time to stay in Dubrovnik for two weeks.

We stayed at the Hotel Tirena in the modern Babin Kuk complex we had visited the year before. Then it had seemed that there was plenty of entertainment going on each night, but staying there for two weeks gave a quite different impression. We got to know the exact time by the numbers the band outside our window were singing, since it was exactly the same repertoire each night. Of course we could wander along the pedestrian walkways to the other end of the complex and hear another band going through their regular routine for a change, but that was about as varied as it got. Nevertheless we really enjoyed this holiday.

We spent a lot of time on the picturesque Babin Kuk beach with its mountainous scenery, and also visited other beaches in Dubrovnik. We spent quite a bit of time in the Lapad area, which is the modern port and shopping district. A woman there used to feed wild cats fish every day. We went on a boat trip in a little craft from this port, and also had drinks on the roof of a department store overlooking the port, with mountains beyond.

We had timed our visit to coincide with the Dubrovnik Festival again. We had done most of our traveling the previous year, but we went on a one day trip south through Montenegro to the Albanian border.

It was not a very memorable tour, not least because a recent earthquake had damaged Kotor and some of the other places en route. We stopped at a village called Ston on the side of a mountain, and walked round its walls. Since part of the walls are in open countryside with a bit of imagination you could believe you were on a very small section of the Great Wall of China. Many of the buildings in Kotor were shored up for support after the earthquake and some streets were closed, but after a look around we got back on the coach and climbed up into the mountains until Kotor and its inlet were laid out like a map far below us.

We headed for Titograd for our lunch stop, but saw nothing of this city evidently important enough to be named after the late leader of Yugoslavia. We were taken to a hotel restaurant in the suburbs for a mediocre meal then straight out again without seeing the center of the city at all.

We then headed further south for Lake Shkoder, the southern part of which is in Albania as is the town of Shkoder. The lake and the area around seemed very eerie, as did the locals. Perhaps it was psychological, knowing we were heading straight for the most mysterious country in Europe – a Stalinist backwater. For me it was a bit like those Hammer horror films as travelers entered Transylvania – very weird and a little scary. It was almost as if we had left planet Earth and entered a parallel universe.

The lake was so still and silent, and seemed to be covered in green leaves and slime. We climbed high into the mountains on the western side of the lake, still heading south, through wooded areas on narrow mountain roads on which the only other traffic was ancient looking horse-drawn carts driven and ridden by people in very strange looking garb, presumably some kind of national or peasant costume. We assumed these were ethnic Albanians, and the sense of foreboding and expectation was intense. In the event it all ended in a big anti-climax.

Suddenly the road turned sharply to the right to go round the mountain, and the coach stopped. We were invited to get out and look into Albania from the edge of this mountain road.

How far we were from the actual border I have no idea, but certainly too far away to see any border fences or observation posts. It all looked so tame and ordinary after the mysterious, sinister mountainous wooded lakeside area we had just come through. Below us was just gently undulating peaceful countryside – we might just as well have been on a hill overlooking Surrey or Kent. Even the eerie Lake Shkoder was now out of sight way over to our left.

When we asked our guide where the border was she unhelpfully said: ‘Where the minarets of the mosques stop’. Enver Hoxha had, of course, ordered them all destroyed in this officially atheistic state. We were far too high up to see any detail, but there were minarets dotted around for some distance, so we were obviously a mile or so from the border at least. I could see a winding river in the distance, which I later ascertained from looking at the map was in Albania, but it was all a huge disappointment and certainly not worth a full day’s coach trip. At least they could have taken us right up to the border after coming all that way.

We drove back north via the coastal road, stopping at Rezevici Monastery on the way. The monks here made some kind of alcoholic spirit which they sold to tourists, and we were all given a sample. George peeked into the kitchen and saw the supposedly celibate monks apparently had nubile female helpers, and he remarked that with the abundance of very high proof alcohol and pretty young females the brothers seemed to lead a pretty good, worldly and distinctly un-monk-like life.

We also stopped briefly outside Budva, another town badly damaged by the recent earthquake, and at a spot overlooking the island town of Sveti Stefan on the way back. We had been up at the crack of dawn, had a lousy lunch and a very long tiring day on the road, seen very little of interest only to get back very late in the evening to a cold supper left for us in the deserted hotel dining room, so we were not very happy.

However, on the whole we did enjoy or second holiday in Yugoslavia, and spent most of it in the Dubrovnik area, again visiting the nearby town of Cavtat and its hilltop mausoleum designed by Mestrovic, whose sculptures we had so admired the year before in Split.

We had a lovely room in the Hotel Tirena, and were very sorry to leave it because it had a little garden with a hedge all round and a tree in the middle. We used to sit out here sometimes enjoying the sun. We also ‘adopted’ a little stray cat which lived in the bushes just outside the hotel, and we used to feed it tins of sardines by the hotel entrance. When I read years later that the Hotel Tirena was one of those badly damaged by shelling in the civil war I just broke down and cried, thinking of the little cat we fed and our peaceful little garden, now possibly both destroyed by wicked, evil men fighting over their silly little border squabbles. Hundreds of thousands massacred by all sides, all in the name of nationalism and independence, and in the end they’ll all have to come together in the European Union for their economic survival.  A beautiful country, Yugoslavia and its people, were torn apart by senseless war and nationalism, and the same happened in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.

In November we went on another long weekend to Amsterdam, visiting Bruges on the way back. This was a particularly memorable visit as we had a likeable woman courier on the coach who was rather camp. We also went by our favorite ferry company, Sally Line, and enjoyed their smorgasbord restaurant.

In Amsterdam we went on the inevitable canal trip, and also visited the gay monument. Of course we wouldn’t ever visit Amsterdam without calling on our friends, the stray cats on the Poesenboot (the cats’ boat) moored on one of the canals.

The weather was cold, wet and miserable in Bruges, where we stopped on the way back, but we did a little tour, bought some delicious Belgian chocolates and had a coffee in the main square.

At Christmas we were off with our friend Andre to Switzerland by way of Brussels and Luxemburg. Leaving on December 23rd, we arrived in Brussels for overnight, and strolled round the main square where they had a Christmas tree and an impressive crib. We also looked round the red light district, and discovered it was a much smaller, tamer version of Amsterdam with the girls sitting in the windows. Our Brussels hotel suite was spacious and luxurious with color television in the lounge and a separate bedroom, with electric candle-light fittings on the wall, and our windows overlooked a main street. Outside the illuminations included a skyscraper with lights left on in the windows to form a gigantic Christmas tree.

We made a brief stop in Luxemburg City, but it was too overcast and misty to see much. We drove on through France and into Switzerland to Lucerne, where we were stopping for two nights.

On Christmas Day we went on a boat trip on Lake Lucerne, and visited the famous lion rock carving in a cliff face. Andre was feeling under the weather so didn’t get off the boat to look at this unusual sculpture. He retired to his bed for the rest of the day when we got back to the hotel, and didn’t even come down to Christmas dinner, which was fairly ordinary and nothing like an English Yuletide feast.

This was the first of several holidays we spent abroad at Christmas. George disliked the festive season and all the hype, not least because his mother had died at that time of year, so we started to go abroad to get away from it all. It usually worked out one year abroad, and the next year at home so I could be with my mother at Christmas.

In Switzerland, I also went on a trip to Engelberg and up the cable car to the top of Mount Titlis on Christmas Day. It was certainly very Christmassy seeing all that snow on the mountains.

Next day Andre was feeling better as we headed west for Berne, stopping briefly on the way in a picturesque Alpine village called Brienz. We lunched in Berne, and had plenty of time to explore this fascinating old city with its shops and famous live bears, living in an enclosure by the bridge across the river. We were very impressed with the arcaded old main shopping street, with its clock tower, statues, etc..

We arrived in Lausanne for our overnight stop in darkness. Andre was determined to have a look around the big shops before they closed, so we made a frantic dash to the big department stores. Next day, the 27th, we headed north through France for Paris, where we had another two nights before returning to London on the 29th.

We loved the Christmas decorations in the Champs Elysee, and vowed to come back again at Christmas. We never did. We booked up for Christmas 1991 over a year in advance, but George never lived to see this trip, so I went with my mother instead and we lit a candle for George in Sacre Coeur, a church we always visited on our Paris trips.

We also visited it on this occasion, perched on a hill in the Montmarte area, and  Notre Dame, the Paris opera and other places on the usual tourist route. We only had one full day, so were limited by time. Andre and I were at the time learning French in the same class, and were using a book which dealt with fictitious characters living in a street in Paris. We decided to go and look at this real street and see how it compared with the drawings in our book. It was very similar, and at least we visited a part of the city none of us knew very well.

Our hotel was a modern skyscraper block (where four years later I stayed with my mother), but the room was tiny, especially when compared with our suite in Brussels. We went down to the Reception and complained that there were only two single beds for three people, and they patiently explained that the third bed pulled out from under one of the other beds. We went back up and discovered this was true, but when all three beds were down there wasn’t an inch of room between them to stand in; the room was filled wall to wall with beds.

We took Andre to our favorite French self-service c