Owning Up: The Trilogy (40 page)

‘What have you got in that pocket, Seaman?’

‘A tickler tin, sir.’

A grim smile of satisfaction spread across his face as he told me to pull it out. The rest of the Liberty Men were torn between resentment at being held up and pleasure in the discomfort of a fellow rating. Making much of it, I finally and apparently reluctantly pulled the tin out of my pocket. He asked me, very sarcastically, what was in it. I told him the exact truth – a star-fish caught in a mousetrap. A wild incredulous whoop of laughter rose from those near enough to hear my answer. It was relayed in whispers to those further down the ranks. Our enemy turned extremely red. He took the tin and opened it. He extracted our object. He looked at it, replaced it, and handed me back the tin. He next asked me why I was taking it out of the camp. ‘To have it photographed, Sir,’ I explained. More laughter. He ordered silence, completed his inspection and let us march ashore. Tony and I were cock-a-hoop. Our cruelty caused us not a moment’s pause. Like schoolmasters, Warrant Officers were fair game. The photographs were unsuccessful; the local photographer, usually confined to the recording of weddings, funerals and Eisteddfods, was unwilling to accept the commission in the first place and the result, after we talked him into it, reflected his suspicious bewilderment.

At long last a short letter arrived for us from the Surrealist Group in London. It expressed interest in, if no great enthusiasm for, our work, and suggested that if either of us was in London in the future, we should contact the secretary, Simon Watson Taylor, at a Chelsea address. We were a little disappointed. We’d both hoped to receive something more positive, and we were depressed too that the letter was signed only by the secretary to the group, and not by ELT Mesens himself. Still at least we’d heard; at least we had an entrée. , Shortly afterwards we passed out as Ordinary Seamen, and after a few weeks hanging about as officers’ messengers, or Quartermasters’ mates, we went sent home on a fortnight’s leave. Tony, a Portsmouth rating alas, would then report to his home barracks, I to Chatham, a town I knew to be intoxicatingly close to London. I only hoped I would be stationed there long enough to make at least some initial contact with the Surrealist Group.

5

I arrived at Chatham barracks on a dank July evening. My hammock and kitbag weighed me down and I had bad dhobi itch as well. Dhobi itch is a weeping rash in the crutch caused by failing to rinse the suds out .from one’s underpants. It is a most dispiriting complaint.

I reported to the Petty Officer on duty. He told me the barracks were full and that I was to sleep on HMS
Argus,
a superannuated aircraft carrier rusting away in the dockyards adjoining the barracks, and which was in use as an overflow base. ‘Don’t bother to make yourself cushy though,’ he advised me with a wolfish smile. ‘We’ll ’ave you out East before the fuckin’ week’s out.’

I tried to appear enthusiastic at this prospect, picked up my hammock and kitbag again, and walked bow-legged and in some discomfort through the dockyard gates in the direction indicated. Twenty breathless and sweaty minutes later I found the
Argus
looming up into the darkening drizzle, and staggered up the gangway on to the Quarter Deck. Formalities completed, I was shown my Mess Deck and later, after a revolting supper of what appeared to be camel’s entrails, slung my hammock for the first time. Bearing in mind what the Petty Officer had promised, I left my kitbag packed. After a few days of digging about in it to find things I needed, I slowly transferred its contents to my locker. I was to remain on HMS
Argus
for over a year.

The
Argus,
as I soon discovered, was a den of skivers, misfits and lunatics, a floating, tethered thieves’ kitchen. Our Captain, an elderly and scrawny religious maniac risen from the ranks, seldom left his cabin and could be heard, during the night watches, loudly declaiming the more bloodthirsty passages from the Old Testament. Despite his age and length of service, he was still – and understandably – a Lieutenant. The rest of the ship’s company were all involved in a conspiracy to remain exactly where they were, tucked snugly away, a cosy and corrupt community dedicated to mutual aid. Among them I soon became friendly with an open-faced and charming rogue nicknamed Wings and after a short time I became his official winger. The expression ‘winger’ means, at its most innocent, a young seaman who is taken under the wing of a rating or Petty Officer older and rriore experienced than himself to be shown the ropes. It can also, although far from inevitably, imply a homosexual relationship, and in our case this was so, but on a comparatively playful and lighthearted level, mostly confined to rum-flavoured kisses when he returned on board.

Wings filled me in on many useful dodges. For example he advised me never to attend the regular pay parades in the barracks. At these parades suspicious marines stalked about seeking out ratings who might be posted to ships about to sail East. Far better to attend the miss-musters parade when those who had been on watch duty drew their money, and only a bored officer and an equally indifferent Petty Officer were present.

To ensure this end he advised me to land a watch-keeping job and I soon managed it. A friendly Chief Petty Officer made me a boatswain’s mate. This proved to be chilly and monotonous; twenty-four hours on duty; four hours watch and watch about on the open Quarter Deck, checking the leave passes of ratings going on or coming off leave and saluting, and occasionally physically assisting aboard, the officers. The advantage was that after coming off duty I was entitled to forty-eight hours’ shore leave – quite long enough to get up to London – and that every other weekend there was seventy-eight hours off, time enough for me to get up to Liverpool.

Wings had advice here too. As to London he suggested that, if I decided I had a future as ‘rough trade’, I should haunt either a pub in Victoria or another in Piccadilly. He himself had been successful in both of them. He told me that if picked up by an old queen who, in the morning, turned out to be less than generous, he usually knocked him about a bit and then walked off with whatever he fancied. He insisted that it was common practice and furthermore it was his view that ‘most of the old buggers’ expected it or even enjoyed it. I was really shocked at Wings and did not believe him, or at any rate chose not to. In another branch of petty criminal activity, however, he was to prove extremely helpful.

Getting to London presented no difficulty; it was quite cheap by train or you could hitch-hike. On the other hand, a return ticket to Liverpool was comparatively expensive and, with only four free travel warrants a year, it looked as though I should, yet again, have to cadge off my parents. ‘No need,’ said Wings when I had explained my dilemma, and he demonstrated an ingenious method whereby, with the aid of a local return ticket, ink remover, diluted Stephen’s green ink, and some reliance on the dim lighting at station barriers and the senility of the wartime inspectors, you could get to any major provincial station and back for approximately five shillings. I practised this deception many times during my
Argus
period. So did many of my fellow ratings, but as far as I can remember no one was ever caught out.

You might wonder why, with London so close and ready to be explored and conquered, I should wish to return to Liverpool at all except for long leaves. The answer was that, while certain that in the end I would become the toast of the town, I realised it might take a little time and meanwhile it was a solace to be able to return home where my mother’s unfailing belief in my eventual triumph, the comfort of friends, the admiration of my fourteen-year-old sister and, above all, the familiar port heavy with childhood associations, would help to restore my confidence. To be frank I was a little in awe of London; a state fostered equally by my father’s reluctance to visit it except when his business as a woolbroker had positively demanded it, and my mother’s pre-war expeditions which, on her return, loaded with toys from Hamley’s, she painted in the most brilliant of colours. ‘I did eight shows in six days,’ she’d tell us excitedly, ‘and went three times to the Savoy Grill with Rex Evans [a night-club owner and performer of the period] and had lunch at the Ivy twice with dear Bobby.’ It sounded rather formidably sophisticated. Also, every time we went to our dentist, a Mr Williams who had his surgery, like many of the medical profession in Liverpool, in Rodney Street, a rather beautiful Georgian terrace, she would say that they were ‘just like London houses’. Sitting tipped back in Mr Williams’s dentist chair, while he chattered to my mother about the latest production at the Playhouse and did painful things inside my mouth, I would imagine that the sky over London must look much as it did above the opposite side of the street and, as I was to recognise much later, the word ‘London’ had become subconsciously associated, and a little anxiously, with dentistry.

It was therefore with a certain tentative apprehension that I began to explore the metropolis. It was true that I had visited it once before. When I was ten, Emma Holt, a rich and kindly cousin of my grandfather, had offered us a choice: she would either pay for my father to take my brother and me up to watch King George VI’s coronation procession from a balcony in the Mall or, if we would prefer it, we could spend a whole week in the capital later in that same year. After some debate we chose the latter, stayed with an aunt in a flat overlooking the river at Barnes, and exhausted my poor father by racing round the zoo, Madame Tussaud’s, the Tower and other traditional ‘sights’. There was however little to compare between this protected and sponsored expedition as a child and my return, almost nine years later, as a solitary seaman. It’s true that there were relations of my mother’s living in flats, mainly-in genteelly unfashionable areas, and friends of hers too with more central addresses and connected with the arts, but obstinately, before contacting anybody – even the Surrealists – I wanted to get at least the feel of the place, to establish at any rate the broadest outline of its central geography, and so for the first month I did little more than walk the streets, visit the museums or, getting on a tube train, travel at random, emerging from any station familiar by name, usually because it figured in ‘Monopoly’.

I also tried to follow Wings’ example (we never went ‘up the Smoke’ together, as for one thing he was on the opposite watch from me and, for another, he considered, quite rightly, that my middle-class effeminacy would reduce his impact as rough trade). Perhaps for this very reason I was not a success with the corseted and discreetly rouged old gentlemen who combed the gay pubs. Occasionally one of them would offer me a half of Guinness, but he would soon lose interest and move towards a more masculine fellow seaman or haughty guardsman, leaving,me to my
New Statesman
at the marble-topped bar. While rather hurt, I was not entirely Unrelieved either. The point was that, while coming on as what Bessie Smith called ‘a skippin’ twistin’ woman-actin’ man’, my real taste was also for butch young men, but with myself in the masculine role. Much later a perceptive if rather coarse-minded rating expressed this with obscenely poetic exactitude: ‘You’re not a brown ‘atter at all,’ he said. ‘You’re an arse-bandit what acts like ’e was a brown ’atter!’

One night, it’s true, I did make a conquest. Having forgotten to book in at the Union Jack Club (1/6d a night), I was sitting shivering on a seat in Leicester Square when a small, middle-aged respectable-looking man wearing glasses and a Crombie overcoat approached me. After offering me a cigarette, he followed it up with a sofa, which I accepted, in his flat in Dolphin Square. I wasn’t deceived by the sofa and was glad to be warm and comfortable, but wished he had not brushed his teeth so thoroughly as the taste of Gibbs’ Dentifrice was overwhelming. At breakfast in the dining room next morning, for I was on a forty-eight hour pass, I had the mild jitters as I knew that somewhere in that huge 1930 rabbit warren of flats there lived a great friend of my mother, an elderly and obsessively respectable actress who would certainly feel it her duty to report back. That morning, however, she must have taken her breakfast in her flat (Meissen figurines and old playbills), and I left fed and rested for the Victoria and Albert Museum. My closet queen made no effort to arrange another meeting, nor did he offer me ‘a present’. I was clearly a final resort; a sheep in wolf’s clothing. He would have much preferred Wings and his ilk. For my part I looked speculatively round his flat. What would Wings have taken? The ivory-handled hairbrush? The heavy ‘portable’ wireless? It was purely academic. The idea of threatening someone of approximately my own class who, that toothpaste flavoured half-hour apart, had behaved like a kindly if boring uncle or friendly housemaster was out of the question.

Once I’d established what I thought of as ‘the magic square’ – that is to say the relative positions of Regent Street, Oxford Street, Park Lane and Piccadilly – I felt secure enough to begin to ring people up. At first it was cousins of my mother; gentle middle-class, middle-aged Jewish ladies who had a spare bed or at least a sofa, but later, as the parks, Soho and Chelsea assumed their approximate location on my mental map, I took to visiting her more artistic friends: a theatrical producer with a flat in the King’s Road, a butch actor and, above all, David Webster who had just come down from Liverpool, to a chorus of vicious screeching from most of the musical establishment, to take up his position as Managing Director of Covent Garden.

I had known David since I was a little boy and like most of my mother’s circle had been encouraged to call him Uncle David, a form of address which, now that I was about the same age as many of his younger friends, I was firmly forbidden to employ.

David was and always had been plump, he had gone bald early; my parents had known him from a very young man and told me that he had always looked exactly the same. He was not especially scrupulous about his person: his nails were, as my mother said, ‘in mourning’, his suits, while well cut, had their collars powdered with dandruff. This was of no importance, however, because he had been born almost unfairly endowed with charm and wit. In the Liverpool of the Twenties and Thirties he ruled the artistic roost. The son of small Scottish shopkeepers (and although in many ways extremely snobbish, he’d never tried to hide them away or upgrade his social origins), he soon proved himself to be brilliant in many directions and with particular flair and feeling for the arts. After graduating from Liverpool University, he’d become extremely active, directing and acting in plays. ‘His feet,’ said my mother describing his appearance as Becket in Eliot’s
Murder in the
Cathedral,
‘were none too clean.’ He’d also taken part in cabarets organised by the members of The Sandon, a club connected with the arts, and here his appearance as Epstein’s
Genesis
in labour under a green spotlight was long remembered. But it was more probably his chairmanship of the Liverpool Philharmonic which had led to his present, much questioned, position.