Owning Up: The Trilogy (34 page)

At 0830 each morning we fell in on the parade ground to salute the flag, another occasion that could prove dangerously risible. This had nothing to do with the Union Jack itself. It was still over twenty years before it was to become a fun object and, although I would never have admitted it at the time, with the war on the turn there was something rather moving about its brisk and fluttering progress up the flagpole. The danger came immediately after the Marine band’s version of the National Anthem. This, while rather elephantine, was efficient enough but it was followed, whether because of a general order or a local whim I never discovered, by the National Anthem of one of the Allies. When it was the turn of an occidental nation this sounded well enough, but the anthems of the East, involving as they did a different scale and rhythmic tradition, could lead to some uncertain and gong-punctuated noises.

Giggling is rarely a solitary occupation. It depends on mutual feedback; a painful attempt to suppress one’s own snorts, tears and whinnies conflicting with an unpleasant desire to see one’s co-giggler reinfected. I had in fact found a friend, someone to laugh with and, for all my determination to crash the class-barriers, he was, typically enough, another public-school rating.

His real name was Graham but the class rechristened him Percy or The Professor. He had a high-pitched definitive voice, a very slightly androgynous walk and rather wide hips. We’d met in the Camp dentist’s waiting-room where I’d been sitting prominently reading a collection of Osbert Sitwell’s verse. Percy, from the other side of the room, told me that he thought less than nothing of Osbert and not much of Edith either. Auden was another matter. I hurriedly agreed with him – a selection of Auden was among my collection of lures and baits – and he strolled across the room to sit next to me, ignoring the friendly if derisive whistling and kissing noises of our fellow conscripts. These were not only because he was distinctly effeminate in both voice and gesture but also because he ‘spoke posh’. This was a perpetual hazard in the Navy. The first day or two in a new mess one was constantly lampooned, especially at meals. ‘I say, old man, be a sport and pass the jolly old salt, what?’ – that kind of thing. It didn’t last long, partly because it became boring if ignored but also because it was based on similar foundations to my own idealisation of the working class en masse – unfamiliarity. For most of the Lower Deck a posh accent was equated with authority: the officers themselves, schoolmasters, bosses, BBC announcers, politicians and, in some cases, magistrates. Now for the first time the owner of a posh voice was vulnerable, equal. Yet because of this, provided we were neither openly arrogant nor patronising, there grew up a collective pride in having us as part of a mess. This pride was sardonic rather than subservient. Long words, for example, were a never-failing reason for incredulous laughter or derision and, in our turn, many of us were tempted to play up, to ingratiate through exaggeration. Very often, running parallel to the mockery, a protective attitude developed. They felt sorry for us in our helplessness, the result of our sheltered upbringing. This too, at any rate for people like Percy and myself with our rather passive homosexual natures, appeared both flattering and pleasurable. The Chief himself projected both the mockery and the protective element.

‘All right, Georgina,’ he’d tell us while handing out jobs, ‘you and Percy can go and clean out the ‘eads together, but don’t play with each other’s squeegees.’ Where the Chief was completely inaccurate, however, was in suggesting that Percy and I had any interest in each other sexually. What we shared were the same tastes – a liking for butch and pretty heterosexual lads, or at any rate those who gave the appearance of heterosexuality.

This is not a case history, nor am I competent to analyse why, at the age of eighteen, I was still more or less completely gay, but perhaps a few pointers might help. To begin with my mother preferred in general the company of homosexuals. In provincial Liverpool they seemed to her to be more amusing, better company, more creative than most heterosexual Liverpudlians, and her fondness for the theatre and, more particularly, the theatrical atmosphere added to her circle a number of visiting firewomen all as camp as Chloë. From my earliest years therefore I had learnt to equate wit and creativity with homosexuality even before I knew what it was. My father, it’s true, was heterosexual but extremely tolerant. He once told me he’d been on a jury in a case of sodomy but that the accused had been acquitted. I asked him if they were guilty. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘but half the jury didn’t think it was possible and the rest of us didn’t think it mattered.’ He had his own hearty heterosexual friends certainly, draught Bass drinkers in the main, but he saw them mostly in pubs. As host he presided over a largely gay ambience or one where at any rate there was no stigma attached to deviance.

My loathed prep-school headmaster, already remarked as initially responsible for my left-wing bias, confirmed me in my admiration for effeminacy through his hysterical and possibly ambivalent hatred of it. I was on one occasion slippered in front of the whole school for insisting, despite warnings, that I would prefer to go to the ballet than watch a game of rugger. In the face of such a brute I felt impelled, as far as a twelve-year-old boy could, to defend all those beautifully dressed, graceful, funny friends of my mother’s.

At the same time that very prep school, particularly after its evacuation to Shropshire at the beginning of the war, was athrob with sexual experimentation of all kinds. By the time I went to Stowe at the age of fourteen I was aware of (if in some instances uninitiated in) every variation of homosexual lovemaking. Yet at this date I hardly equated our pre-adolescent fumbling with those gay and witty young men I knew to be, in the fashionable slang of the time, pansies. Stowe bridged this gap, or at least an aesthetic set at Stowe did so. Wilde, Beardsley, Firbank, Proust became, by association, our mentors. We called our physical relationships ‘affairs’ and wrote each other poor if purple verses.

I left Stowe a convinced homosexual, believing and accepting that I would always remain one. I felt no shame; on the contrary I considered myself part of an elite, a freemasonry whose members held most of the keys to what was truly creative and exciting in the grown-up world. But, while genuinely attracted by boys, I was not inwardly entirely committed to my own sex. Even from quite a small boy I’d fantasised about girls, usually circus or pantomime performers and, at the cinema, the more obvious platinum blondes, bar-room whores and Busby Berkeley chorines. Yet somehow I managed to convince myself that these fantasies in no way impinged on the purity of my homosexuality. The reason, I suspect now – for at the time I merely avoided correlating the two elements – was a pretty firm conviction that I would never be able to persuade a girl to say yes. My nature has always been to avoid any situation in which I thought I might fail.

I’d also developed several painful heterosexual crushes during my later childhood: a golden-skinned, violet-eyed Burne-Jones girl who’d spent a holiday with us in the Lake District the first summer of the war and, a year or two earlier, a sultry, long-legged paying guest, the daughter of a friend of my mother’s who, whether provocatively or because she failed to recognise the explicit sexual feelings of a precocious ten-year-old, allowed me to sit and watch her put on her make-up, wearing only her bra and cami-knicks, and for whom I bought Black Magic chocolates whenever I could afford it.

Yet these girls, and others less obsessively desired, were all eighteen or nineteen, in practical terms as inaccessible as the proud girl on the trapeze or the platinum-blonde Hollywood vamp. Boys on the other hand presented no such problem and, as I grew older, men too became viable. After all, it was they who might want me. I could refuse or accept and, even if I found them not especially attractive with their stubble, thinning hair and sagging flesh, I derived satisfaction from feeling myself wanted, from flattery, from having something to give. Ideally, however, I preferred those of my own age or a little younger, thought of myself as Oscar Wilde, making up what I might lack in beauty – for I was never physically vain – by charm and wit. I was also, for all my emotional passivity, in this area the active partner. A too-early and impetuously executed experience of sodomy had made it impossible for me to be buggered without fainting.

In the realm of friendship I was never committed solely to fellow pederasts. In fact my closest friends were usually, while of necessity uncensorious of my proclivities, heterosexual. In them, however, I sought an iconoclastic spirit. They all despised pomposity, taboos, fake emotions. They were expected to lead or goad me on to acts of outrage, to defy authority, to unmask humbug. I remained, during my naval days, in correspondence with several of them and we met, when on leave or stationed near each other, whenever possible. My mother, in general, tended to prefer my homosexual friends. They were better mannered, fell more readily under her spell and didn’t, except in the sexual sense, attack or offend society so aggressively. She felt the others were apt to ‘encourage me’.

Percy and I shared a common enthusiasm for the cinema and literature. He however was a classical music buff while I, despite a short-lived period in my teens when I sat, outwardly intense, inwardly bored silly, through a season of concerts at the Liverpool Philharmonic, was not. He was completely unmoved by jazz or blues, already my ruling passion, and like many extremely musical people was comparatively uninterested in the visual arts.

He was a severe literary critic, applying to individual poems, for example, a close analysis far removed from my own vague emotional response. I showed him with some pride a long poem on Prometheus I had written in Spenserian stanzas which I had entered successfully for a prize at school. ‘It’s no good,’ he snapped, and showed me a poem by a schoolfriend of his about waiting at night on a lonely station platform. I had to admit it was a real poem, not a limp romantic pastiche, but I didn’t love him for it.

Films were a less contentious area. We were united in our admiration for Bogart in particular and the American crime thriller in general. We both admired Welles without reservation; at Stowe I had once reduced a small boy to tears because he had admitted to finding
Citizen Kane
boring after a Saturday night showing in the gym. We both loathed war-propaganda films – even the Bogart pictures of that period were often flawed by a five minute ‘message’ tacked on at the end – and we particularly abhorred the cycle of Hollywood ‘occupation’ movies with their unpleasant mixture of schmaltz, sadism and complete unreality.

We both enjoyed, although perhaps with a certain condescension, low pubs and music halls. Although we quite liked the ENSA shows in the camp theatre, we preferred a small, extremely tatty hall in the town itself where the comics were both Hue and hopeless, the jugglers dropped their props, the performing dogs ran off stage, and the chorines, some openly chewing gum supplied no doubt by American airmen from one of the nearby USAF bases, were just as openly contemptuous of their simple routines.

If asked at that time my aspirations I would have said – despite Percy’s rejections of ‘Prometheus’ – ‘to be a writer’. After a few pints, and I became inebriated in those days on an enviably small quantity of cheap flat mild, I was convinced that I understood the poetic significance of everything: the mahogany and engraved glass, the pool of beer on the bar, the faded fly-blown pre-war advert for gin, cigarette smoke, overheard fragments of conversation. Sitting in that music hall, enchanted by a tatty backcloth of a ‘modernistic’ cityscape or noting how the footlights by reversing the pattern of light and shade on a comedian’s face emphasised the dead, puppet-like quality of his act, I would say to myself very solemnly: ‘one day I must get this all down’.

I didn’t actually write anything however. Admiration for others inhibited me. I believed that until I felt myself able to equal the interplay between inner and outer reality in the opening paragraphs of Joyce’s
Ulysses
there was no point in starting, and I wasn’t quite ready for that yet. One day, I was convinced, I would sit down with a notebook and several sharp pencils and write, without hesitancy, the opening sentences of the greatest novel of the century. Until then I was ‘living’, ‘absorbing impressions’, and limbering up for the obligatory spell of ‘silence, exile and cunning’ at some later date. The point was that, like most protected youths with literary interests, both Percy and I saw everything through established writers’ eyes. In Skegness, admittedly livelier than most resorts due to the presence of military and naval establishments nearby, and no longer heavily fortified against invasion, we would chant ‘August for the people’ as we reeled its near-empty streets.

At a ‘talent night’ in camp Percy, despite his indifference to jazz, condescended to accompany me on ‘Frankie and Johnny’, a ballad he would allow some virtues as Auden had included it in his anthology of folk poetry. Percy’s classical training meant that his version was rather stiff and academic. My singing was more enthusiastic than tuneful, but we won for all that and were asked to stage a repeat performance in the Petty Officers’ mess by our Chief, where we were made much of and treated to a great deal of beer. Yet despite our success I was unable to convince Percy that there was anything in jazz. I was not however alone in my enthusiasm. I soon found out that the rediscovery of Morton, Oliver, early Louis and Bessie Smith was not, as I had imagined, a local phenomenon confined to a small group at Stowe. When I whistled, recognisably if only approximately, a chorus from Louis’ ‘Kneedrops’ in the NAAFI, it was identified by a young Glaswegian and later, after I’d sung ‘Frankie and Johnny’, other ratings came up and admitted to a keen interest in the music. Jazz, it seemed, was a widespread minority passion that cut across all traditional class and cultural barriers and through it, without thinking about it, I discovered the key to the door I had been trying to force: communication with some of those whom my mother, reacting to my insistent and provocative hymning of their’ praises in every letter I sent home, had taken to describing as ‘your friends, the working classes’. At the end of our second week, the time we were due to be transferred to Ipswich, we were told that there was a bottleneck and that we would be staying at Skegness for up to five weeks more to do intensive square-bashing, PT and some elementary seamanship. I went home for a few days’ leave. Shortly after I got back to camp we had a nasty shock. The reason for our hold-up became clear. The Navy had drawn too many Ordinary Seamen. We were to be made either cooks, writers or stewards or, if unsuitable for any of these roles, redirected into the Army.