was deeply ashamed.
I’m afraid this somewhat soured my relationship with Mr Rose, at least on my side, because, although he never heard or found out what I’d done, I just knew I couldn’t continue in the same vein. So I rather dropped the enthusiasm and keenness to please him further and to continue being good at English. I’m not a writer and never will be.
This was far from the case with school plays, which Bobby Brown, my main History teacher, invariably directed. Here I was fated to thrive from the start. Before my voice broke I played mainly the females: Lady Macduff in Macbeth, which I doubled with Fleance, Ann Boleyn, several Pinero heroines, and I played Doto in Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent.
These females were an astonishing and fortunate run of roles: my first encounter with the feelings of the opposite sex, although Mr Brown was diligent in making us boys understand the minds and words of all the characters we were playing. There was possibly, without my knowing it, some kind of special accord between the female side of me and these roles: a sensitivity to being vulnerable perhaps? Heaven forbid!
Often I acted with another boy, Graham Smith, who later became an artist, and we’d giggle a lot together, a habit I regret to say I carried through into my early professional life and even later. Graham was a big influence on me at grammar school. He was very camp and would shout, pull faces and play the fool, and this was in the days before scathing humour caught on in the way it has now. He came from a troubled and tragic family – his mother died when he was six. I believe – although hardly any of us at that time knew that such things happened and certainly never talked about them, as he didn’t either – that he was sexually abused by an older boy in a summer house for slum kids, and this introduction by older boys and men to an active sex life continued, some of which he rather enjoyed.
Graham was quite feminine, and he liked dressing up in women’s clothes. Once, when he came round to my house at Essex Road, he raided Mum’s wardrobe and put on her evening dress. We went out into the garden where I took photographs of him in it. He would come to school with a purple scarf with sequins wound round his neck and perhaps over his head, and he was just asking to be bullied by the butch boys. He was the Quentin Crisp of these early days – laying himself open to be picked on – but in a way he was a toughie, too, and if the butch boys had started anything he would have fought his corner.
There were four of us – Graham, Robin Dowsett, Michael Folkard and me. Michael was thin and angular, with a sibilant voice, and later worked as a successful set designer. Robin, in future years, became devoutly religious. He was the sweetest of men. We formed a gang or gaggle; Graham became leader, mesmerising us all by being so bold and flamboyant; a wild, daring, flaming creature. We were his entourage.
It never occurred to us that being camp meant anything, and we didn’t even know the word. We just spoke the same language, giggled, felt secure in one another’s company. I suppose it was an early indication of being gay, without overtly recognising it. So we weren’t the hearty types, the ‘rugger buggers’, we were just easy in mutual companionship. We never did much to flout authority – the school wasn’t Grange Hill – and discipline was well maintained.
But I do remember an exception when Graham inflamed the headmaster’s wrath at the assembly that was held every morning, when a boy was deputed to do the reading from the Bible. Everybody stood for assembly, we had prayers and the reading, the head would say something and give the notices. Finally another boy would put on a piece of music, a Bach or Beethoven record, or something else to inspire in us the mood for learning and study.
Graham, when his turn came to go up on the stage, did not exactly choose a rousing popular aria, or something worthy like Elgar’s Nimrod Variations, to put the boys in the right frame of mind. He picked Ella Fitzgerald singing a very sultry and sexy song, ‘I’m Beginning to See the Light’:
I never cared much for moonlit skies
I never winked back at fireflies
But now that the stars are in your eyes
I’m beginning to see the light.
From the first verse this got more and more raunchy:
I never saw rainbows in my wine
But now your lips are burning mine ...
By the end there was a stunned silence. The staff were outraged, while Graham was taken away to be beaten by the head (Mr Cummings insisted, in spite of his withered arm, on punishing the boys himself).
From that moment on the head and Graham were adversaries.
Mum and Dad were so proud of me having got into Leyton County High that every time I went to visit them where they worked in Walthamstow they would show me off to other members of the store staff. Dad looked after the crockery ware, and ran a stall outside on the street where they sold plates, crystal glass, vases, jugs, earthenware and porcelain, which influenced me so much I became an avid collector, when later I could afford them, of Staffordshire pots. I had taken over the task from Dad of standing out on the street and selling the store’s crockery. This developed my hawking skills and my lungs as I learnt the street cries.
Family carried on being the pre-eminent presence in my life. I’d walk twenty minutes from school to Aunt Hilda’s every day to eat lunch, wolfing down with delight my favourite cheese and potato pie. Saturday nights we had our supper upstairs with Grandpa and Grandma, which always consisted of jellied eels with mash, washed down with a lovely sauce. I hated and refused to touch the eels, which came from Manzi’s pie shop round the corner. They had a great vat of these slithery eels into which they would stick a hand, pull one out and then kill it in front of you, chop and gut the thing – then cook it. I couldn’t stomach the eels, but I loved the sauce they simmered them in, which tasted great with the mash.
Every Wednesday the three of us, Mum, Dad and I, went to the pictures at one of our many local cinemas, like the Ritz or King’s in Leyton, or all the way to the Regal Edmonton, to see a main feature movie together with an additional feature (the B-film, which was usually in black and white and was likely to involve a bank robbery), while often the organ rose from the pit and the organist played selections during the interval while the usherettes served ice cream.
I loved all those glamorous, sultry female film stars of the Forties and early Fifties, from Barbara Stanwyck, Greer Garson, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner to Vivien Leigh and the young Elizabeth Taylor – a weekly diet of extraordinary women. We ate fish and chips after the pictures and would then rush back home to hear Donald Peers on the radio singing ‘In a Shady Nook by a Babbling Brook’ at the start of his programme. A boy or girl of my age could stand outside the cinema if they were showing an ‘A’ or adult film and ask a couple or single adult who arrived to buy a ticket to take him or her in with them. You paid for yourself but you pretended you were a son or daughter.
After I recovered from rheumatic fever, the two sports the doctors recommended for me to practise were cycling and swimming. Cycling was too painful, so I took up swimming. My friend Howard was the son of the superintendent of the local baths, known as Leyton Super Baths. He and I were able to go on a Sunday when the baths were closed, and we had the whole pool to ourselves.
I swam in a lot of galas. One of the disadvantages of frequent swimming was that I grew giant verrucas on my heels, which had to be injected in the
