gossipy old woman. Howard was impressed by his acting skills: âEven though [he] was talking to an imaginary person you could always hear the replies he was getting from his phrasing. He produced a personality on the other side of that garden wall without you ever seeing that person.â29 Howard was also fascinated by the fact that Evans, when dressed as â and behaving like â a woman, could get away with the kind of material that, if it had been delivered by (or, in his case, as) a man, would have sounded far too âblueâ.
It was this sense of serving up an audience sauce through indirection, of sending out an encrypted signal of naughtiness, that drove Howard himself deeper and deeper into the camp sensibility, and often into drag. He wrote a new musical comedy routine, entitled âMiss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twitâ, and, alongside two of his male colleagues, performed it dressed up as ATS girls. The trio (with Howard centre-stage as Miss Twit) began the act as follows:
Here we come, here we come,
The girls of the ATS â
Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit.
(Repeat)
The huge amount of work we do,
You know, youâll never guess.
But in Army life we fit â¦
To bend we never ought,
Because our skirts are short.
But they really do reveal
That weâve got sex appeal.
And if you want a date,
Enquire at the gate
For Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit â¦30
It went down well inside the boisterous barracks, and it also proved popular on those occasions when they were given permission to perform outside as part of a touring concert party called the Co-Odments.31 It ran into trouble, however, when, right in the middle of one lunchtime performance in the Mess, the air-raid siren started up. As the audience stampeded for the exit, Howard had just enough time to remove his wig, the two balloons that passed for breasts and the painfully tight womanâs shoes, and wriggle out of the borrowed ATS outfit and slip back into his own uniform â but, in the rush, the thick layer of make-up and the strip of ruby-red lipstick were forgotten. Out on parade, he stood stock still with his rifle, pack and painted face, looked straight ahead, and hoped for the best.
A young subaltern arrived to inspect the ranks. He approached Howard, gave him a cursory glance, moved on, stopped, shook his head, and then turned back for another, closer look. For a moment, neither man spoke: Howard stared blankly into the distance, trying his hardest not to twitch or tremble, and the officer, head cocked slightly to one side like a quizzical cocker spaniel, stared fixedly at his face. Finally, the officer managed a cough, which Howard took as the cue for him to offer some kind of explanation. âC-concert party,â he stammered, the panic strangling his voice into a squeaky falsetto. âThe alert went,â he struggled on, âin the m-middle of the c-concert party.â The officer seemed dazed: âConcert party ⦠Er, yes ⦠Mmmm ⦠Concert party ⦠Jolly good.â He moved on along the line, stopping every now and again for a nervous glance back and a quick shake of the head, before departing hurriedly off into the distance. It had been a narrow escape, but it would not be the last time an officer would stare at Howard, in or out of drag, and shake his head and think: âEr, yes ⦠Mmmm â¦â32
The fact was that Frankie Howard was a homosexual. It seems that he had not always been entirely sure, in his own mind, about the true nature of his sexuality, but military life, with its all-male community, had started to draw out his deepest desires. He formed his first relatively intimate adult friendship with a fellow-soldier at Shoeburyness, a young man whom some of his contemporaries (reflecting the casual homophobia so common at that time) freely described as âsissifiedâ.33
There appears to have been little doubt, among the other soldiers in the garrison, as to what kind of relationship it was (or at least had the potential to become), but, fortunately, few seemed inclined either to report or condemn it. Although, in those days, homosexuality was illegal, it has since been estimated that at least 250,000 homosexuals served in the British armed forces during the Second World War, and, ironically, most of them were accorded a far greater measure of tolerance, compassion and respect, informally, than many of their successors would receive in peacetime. âAll the gays and straights worked together as a team,â recalled one who was there, explaining: âWe had to because our lives might have depended on it.â34
Howard and âhis right-hand manâ (as some teases took to calling him) knew and understood the unwritten rule: so long as they were discreet, the relationship would probably remain safe. According to one of their old Army colleagues, Tom Dwyer, the couple never dared to attempt anything more demonstrative, in the presence of others, than the odd furtive touch of hands in the darkness between their beds. One night, Dwyer recalled, he noticed, as he drifted off to sleep, that each man was lying on his own bunk, but was still linked to the other by a shadowy outstretched arm: âThey were, like, holding each otherâs little finger.â35 Such was often the sum of stolen intimacies to be treasured by those soldiers who sheltered âsecretâ loves.
For Howard and his partner, however, there was always the unique freedom afforded them by the stage, with its licence for âlarger than lifeâ personalities and playful poses, and, for a while, the relationship had room to thrive. âThey got on like a house on fire,â remembered Dwyer.36
Then came an enforced separation. Howard was posted to a new Ministry of Defence âExperimental Stationâ over on Foulness â the largest of the six islands forming an archipelago in south-east Essex. He still returned each night to sleep in the barracks at Shoeburyness, but, with less time to spend with his partner and more time to spend on planning his concert parties, some of the original passion began to dissipate.
The camp attitude, however, did not. It was now part of him, as well as part of his act. It was the means by which he protected himself, preserved his sanity and made palatable his own occasionally prickly personality. A mixture of candour, sarcasm and self-parody, it could almost always be relied on to elicit a laugh, or at least an indulgent or confused âEr, yes ⦠Mmmmâ, when a blast of invective might otherwise have been expected.
It came in particularly handy when Howard, during one of his fleeting visits back to Southend to appear with the Co-Odments concert party, found himself on stage with a piano accompanist called Mrs Vera Roper (he had worked first, and often still did during this period, with another member of the party by the name of Mrs Blanche Moore, but on this particular night it was Mrs Roper who was seated at the piano). Although Roper had performed with Howard before without experiencing the slightest form of a mishap, on this particular occasion her mind seemed to be elsewhere â much to her young colleagueâs evident irritation. Cue after cue was missed, as she stared off into space and he stammered and struggled to cover up the mistakes. Howardâs patience finally snapped after she twice failed to hear â or at least respond
