My Father and Myself (15 page)

How much of this excellent advice I took, or was constitutionally able to take, I don't remember; very little, I imagine, for later on I went so far as to rent a flat in Portsmouth for the sailor and myself in order to see more of him than I was seeing in London. There, like any possessive housewife, I catered and cooked for him while he was at work, impatiently awaiting the moment of his return. One evening he said irritably, “What, chicken again!” It is the only speech he ever made that has stuck in my mind. The end was clearly in view, but it came, strangely and sadly enough, not through anything I put into
his
mouth, but through something I took into my own. I did to him the very thing that had so revolted me in Cambridge in the revelations of my homosexual friend's love-life. This was a thing I had never done before, reluctantly since and out of politeness if requested. It is a form of pleasure I myself have seldom enjoyed, passively or actively, preferring the kiss upon the lips, nor have I ever been good at it. Some technical skill seems required and a retraction of the teeth which, perhaps because mine are too large or unsuitably arranged, seem always to get in the way. Squeamishness with comparative strangers over dirt or even disease disturbs me, and I have noticed that those normal young men who request for themselves this form of amusement never offer it in return. It is also, in my experience, a stimulation usually desired by a somewhat exhausted sex; it may produce quicker results for them than masturbation, but they are not quick, and to be practically choked for ten minutes or so after one's own orgasm has passed is something I have never enjoyed.

I suppose I acted towards my sailor thus because his body was so beautiful and desirable that I simply wanted to eat it. It was a fatal mistake. He cut future appointments, plunging me in despair. When, at length, I saw him again I asked if I had displeased him in any way. Roughly he replied, “You know what you did! You disgusted me!” After that he deserted me entirely for a year and a half, while I pined for him in the darkest dejection of spirit and lost much weight. Then, through the mediation of one of his brothers (a homosexual, oddly enough, and of a far more affectionate character, but unfortunately too effeminate to attract me), he wrote to apologize (“I behaved rottenly to you and you didn't deserve it”) and called. He had a new gentleman friend now, I had learned from his brother, who took him for holidays to Nice and Cannes and had doubtless completed his education in matters of sex, thereby arousing his conscience over me; yet I think he would have resumed sex with me too, if only I had been able to control the emotion in my voice and the trembling of the arm I put around his shoulders. He did not want emotion, only fun. He then disappeared out of my life.

The Ideal Friend was never so nearly found again, though, as I interpret my life now, I devoted most of my leisure in the succeeding fifteen years to the search for him, picking up and discarding innumerable candidates. My restlessness at this time was such that two arresting comments made to me by friends concerned for my happiness may be quoted. Forrest Reid, sitting with me one day in Hyde Park, said, “Do you really care about anyone?” To this searching question I do not know the answer, it goes too deep; since people and events vanish so easily from my memory it may be no. The other friend wrote, “I seize my pen to read you a lecture on your character.... I think you are scared or bored by response. Here my lecture ends, for how you are to alter yourself I know not; but sometimes the comment of an outsider helps so I make it. I think love is beautiful and important—anyhow I have found it so in spite of all the pain— and it will sadden me if you fail in this particular way.” This reproach was, I suppose, much the same as the first, but I see myself in it more clearly, clearly enough to hazard an answer. I got response, doubtless because of my youth and looks, more readily than my lecturer, who went without either; I was therefore, when it came, less grateful, more “choosy,” than he would have been; I was not scared or bored by it when my own physical desires were caught and held, as they were by less than half-a-dozen chaps in my post-Cambridge life; on the other hand, response from these, the boys who took my fancy, never contented me either, or for long, there seemed always something wrong, disappointing, frustrating. The superficiality of this answer will be plainly seen by the reflective reader; I was not reflective at the time. Another friend of mine once told me that he was able to cut clean out of his life and thought any emotional affair that was causing him unhappiness.
That
I could never do; indeed I may be said to have wallowed in the very miseries he avoided; and I sometimes wonder, though I cannot know, whether that remark in the letter I have just quoted, “perhaps happiness is not your deepest need,” may not be profoundly true, whether the hardship of it all was the very thing I wanted, the frustrations, which often seemed to me so starveling and wretched, my subconscious choice.

My restlessness during these fifteen years increased; I was seldom relaxed and did little writing or reading, for what was happening outside in the streets? what was I missing by staying indoors? I was rarely happy in any one place, for all the other places where I was not appeared, in my imagination, more rewarding than the one I occupied. The Ideal Friend was always somewhere else and might have been found if only I had turned a different way. The buses that passed my own bus seemed always to contain those charming boys who were absent from mine; the ascending escalators in the tubes fiendishly carried them past me as I sank helplessly into hell. Unless I had some actual business or social engagement (often maddening, for then, when punctuality or responsibility was unavoidable and I was walking with my host or guest, the Ideal Friend would be sure to appear and look deep into my eyes as he passed) I seldom reached my destination, but was forever darting off my buses, occupied always, it seemed, by women or Old Age Pensioners, because on the pavements below, which I was constantly scanning, some attractive boy had been observed. Yet one of my old anxieties, now in public form, persisted: I had to feel an absolute degree of confidence. Industrious predator though I was, I was not a bold or reckless one. One of my father's yarns concerned a man who told a friend that whenever he saw an attractive girl he went straight up to her and said, “Do you fuck?” “My word!” said the friend. “Don't you get an awful lot of rebuffs?” “Of course,” was the reply; “but I also get an awful lot of fucking.” I was not in the least like that. I did not want rebuffs or cuffs, nor did I want the police summoned. I had to feel reasonably safe and developed furtive techniques to aid me. I did not like boys to think I was pursuing them, they might turn nasty; the safest thing was the quick “open” exchange of understanding looks or smiles. For this it was necessary to meet people face to face, a problem if the particular boy was moving in the same direction. In such a case I would hasten after him, pass him without a glance (in the hope of not being noticed), and when I had reached what I considered to be an invisible distance ahead, turn about to retrace my steps for a head-on collision. If then I got a responsive look, a smile, a backward glance, if he then stopped to stare after me or to study the goods in the nearest shop-window (the more incongruous they were the safer I felt) I judged I might act, though still with caution in case he was luring me into some violent trap. The elaborateness of this maneuver often lost me the boy, he had gone into a house or disappeared up some side turning behind my back—and therefore remained in my chagrined thought as the Ideal Friend.

This obsession with sex was already taking me, of course to foreign countries, France, Italy, Denmark, where civilized laws prevailed and one was not in danger of arrest and imprisonment for the color of one's hair. Many anxieties and strains were therefore lessened abroad; at the same time—a delayed conclusion—what was the good of making friends in other countries? One wanted them in one's own, one wanted them in one's home. In any case I was condemned to my own country for eleven months in the year, for in 1928, as I have already related, I had joined the staff of the BBC and was to remain in it for thirty years. My field of sexual activities was therefore confined chiefly to London, and how, in that enormous, puritanical and joyless city, could one find the Ideal Friend? Where did one begin to look? One needed a focus, such as the popular promenades, gardens, locales, gay bars, baths, and brothels so generously provided in foreign towns. London offered only some tatty pubs in Soho and elsewhere, the haunts of queans, prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, pansies, debauched service-men, and detectives, a few dull clubs frequented by elderly queers, and some dark and smelly urinals, which were not to my taste. To hang about Piccadilly Circus and its tube station, which I often did, was seldom rewarding, and I had not the necessary patience for long-term investigations into such perhaps fruitful foci as public swimming baths, youth hostels, YMCAs, working men's clubs, boy scout organizations, etc. In the 'thirties I found myself concentrating my attention more and more upon a particular society of young men in the metropolis which I had tapped before and which, it seemed to me, might yield, without further loss of time, what I required. His Majesty's Brigade of Guards had a long history in homosexual prostitution. Perpetually short of cash, beer, and leisure occupations, they were easily to be found of an evening in their red tunics standing about in the various pubs they frequented, over the only half-pint they could afford or some “quids-in” mate had stood them, in Knightsbridge, Victoria, the Edgware Road and elsewhere, or hanging about Hyde Park and the Marble Arch, with nothing to do and nothing to spend, whistling therefore in vain to the passing “prossies,” whom they contemptuously called “bags” (something into which something is put), and alert to the possibility that some kind gentleman might appear and stand them a few pints, in return for which and the subsequent traditional tip—a pound was the recognized tariff for the Foot Guards then, the Horse Guards cost rather more—they were perfectly agreeable to, indeed often eager for, a “bit of fun.” In their availability and for other reasons they suited my book; though generally larger than I liked, they were young, they were normal, they were working-class, they were drilled to obedience; though not innocent for long, the new recruit might be found before someone else got at him; if grubby they could be bathed, and if civility and consideration, with which they did not always meet in their liaisons, were extended to them, one might gain their affection.

Evening after evening, for many years, when I was free I prowled Marble Arch, the Monkey Walk and Hyde Park Corner, or hastened from pub to pub as one unrewarding scene replaced another. Seaport towns also (sailors too were jolly and short of cash) were often combed at weekends. The taint of prostitution in these proceedings nevertheless displeased me and must, I thought, be disagreeable to the boys themselves, accept it though they did. I therefore developed mutually face-saving techniques to avoid it, such as standing drinks and giving cash at once and, without any suggestive conversation, leaving the boy free to return home with me if he wished, out of sexual desire or gratitude, for he was pretty sure to know what I was after. This, I suppose, was akin to my father's technique of bribery in advance for special restaurant service, for of course I too hoped for responsiveness to generosity and was annoyed if I did not get it. A similar but more self-restrained and hazardous form of procedure was to treat the soldier, if he was particularly attractive, to a pleasant evening's entertainment—cinema, supper— give him a present at the end of it when he had to return to barracks, and leave it to him to ask, “When can I see you again?” Thus, by implying that it was more his society then his body that interested me, did I hope to distinguish myself from the other “twanks” (as guardsmen called people like myself) and gain his respect. If he did not turn up to his future appointment I was upset and would loiter about his barracks for days. These methods had another advantage: they disarmed, or could be hoped to disarm, any tendency the guardsman might have to robbery or violence. Such incidents were not frequent but they occurred, sometimes brutal (the homosexual who was found murdered, his penis severed and stuck into his own mouth), sometimes jolly (the Hammersmith quean, who, robbed by a guardsman of his fur coat, flew out in a rage and found a policeman, who quickly recovered the conspicuous garment and went to bed with the grateful owner himself). Cautious and nervous as I was, I myself did not get through without a few episodes of extortion and theft, in France of actual violence, so repugnant to my mind that I noticed in course of time that the boys I picked up were almost always mild and characterless, as perhaps they had been from the very beginning; character tended to be difficult, and it was as though some instinct for safety within me recognized and selected boys with no character whatever.

As I have said, I never came so close to finding the Ideal Friend again but, my standards declining, I found a number of decent boys who attracted me, of whom I grew fond as they grew fond of me, who entered my family life as I entered theirs, and who afforded me further rests upon the way. For one reason or another they were all imperfect, a common imperfection being that, though obliging, they were, like the Richmond tradesboy of my early days, physically unresponsive to homosexual love. One of them was married, the others had girls somewhere in the background. This was one of the first things I had to give way on, because it was recurrent. The girl friend was a situation all too liable to be found in the lives of normal boys, and my formula (as I now see it) had to be modified to meet it. Since women could not be excluded they had to be admitted; I never suffered much from jealousy and the Ideal Friend could have a girl or a wife if he wished, so long as she did not interfere with me. No wife ever failed to interfere with me.

These boys remained my friends for some years, until the second war killed them or they disappeared into marriage. They were what homosexuals call “steadies,” that is to say they propped up one's mind, one could call upon their company and comfort if available, if required—and if nothing more hopeful offered. For valuable though they were, the belief remained that one could do better, better, better, and so one continued to hurl oneself into the fray. This
ignis fatuus
caused me to behave inconsiderately to them at times, even to hurt the feelings my genuine affection for them had aroused, and one at least had the spirit to reprove me when I fobbed him off from an appointment with a present of money because some more promising new candidate had since appeared upon the scene. Another of them, to whom in the beginning I had given bad marks, became in the end, I suddenly perceived, the best and most understanding friend I had ever made; a Welsh boy, gentle, kind, cheerful, undemanding, self-effacing, always helpful, always happy to return to me in spite of neglect, and in control (a rare thing) of his jealous wife, I realized his value so deeply at last that he involved my heart. His feet smelt, poor boy, some glandular trouble, and out of politeness he preferred not to take off his boots. He was killed in the war. When I had lost him and remembered the course of our friendship, how it had gradually sprouted and burgeoned out of such, for me, unpropitious soil, I wondered how many other decent boys I had carelessly rejected in pursuit of my
ignis fatuus
. Some, I recalled, had made so little impression upon me at our one and only congress that, seeing them again some months later sunning themselves on the grass of Hyde Park, I could not even remember what had passed between us.