Owning Up: The Trilogy (44 page)

I was eventually introduced to his parents, a course Reggie found preferable to bumping into them fairly regularly in the hall or lift. His father looked like a rather dated caricature of an elderly English aristocrat, having a red face and bristling white moustache, and wearing rather old tweeds much patched and mended. His mother was American, a small, animated, prettily bird-like woman who conducted the tea from behind a battery of silver teapots, hot-waterpots, milk jugs, cream jugs, sugar basins, slop basins, tea strainers and sugar bowls. I was careful to call him ‘sir’, and they seemed to accept me as Reggie’s friend, but I was however puzzled as to how much they knew about his propensities. In this, as in much else, I was naïf.

Often in later life, people have asked me if I have ever been to an orgy or, as the Sixties preferred to call it, become involved in ‘group sex’ and, thinking in terms of heterosexuality, I’ve always said no, or at any rate only to the extent of a threesome or as a quarter of an interchangeable quartet. In fact at this period of my life I was fairly frequently a participant in mass homosexuality but, thinking of it as simply an extension of schoolboy activities, I never associated it with an orgy, a term I felt to imply a Roman profusion of grapes, wine, buttocks, breasts, marble
chaises-longues,
and squiffy laurel crowns. At Reggie’s, however, there were fairly regular orgies involving Guards’ officers and other ranks, plus interested civilians, and I found them perfectly acceptable and guilt-free. My speculations about Reggie’s parents in no way extended to their butler Grope who not only appeared to think nothing of serving breakfast in bed on mornings when we were alone, but was equally detached in proffering cups of coffee to a writhing mass of bodies or actively horizontal couples strewn around the flat. Despite his rather bland if precious manner, the moonfaced Grope knew his place. He showed no more excitement than if he had been present at a more conventional ‘at home’ and never attempted to participate. He was, in the true sense, a gentleman’s gentleman. As to my doubts as to how much Lord Kestrel was aware of what was going on, these were soon resolved, but the cause of his angry confrontation with his son was not so much to do with what was going on, as with the accompanying noise.

I had, of course, tried to interest Reggie in jazz but he didn’t really like it, and particularly not as a background to sensual activity. Here he favoured Edmundo Ros played at full volume on a radiogram. There were no LPs then of course but, by stacking up twelve 78s, he was ensured of about forty minutes’ worth of rumbas, sambas and cha-cha-chas and eventually somebody would turn the lot over. The insistent rhythm plus people falling off beds or over each other, shrieking or giggling, knocking over glasses, and banging away all over the flat was quite enough to wake His Lordship a floor or two below and, though Reggie theoretically asked his guests not to make too much noise, the amount of Pimm’s No 1, the drink he usually provided to make things go, ensured that in practice no one took much notice of this request.

On the night in question I had fallen asleep up a very pleasant boy in the RAF. In the ensuing debacle I found the time to apologise for this breach of sexual manners and he accepted my apologies with good grace — not that there was much time for recrimination even if he had wanted to. His Lordship was standing at the entrance to the flat wearing an ancient fawn dressing-gown with a frayed plaited cord, striped pyjamas and very old leather slippers and shouting at his naked son that everybody must get out at once or he would call the police. Meanwhile, panic-stricken, Reggie’s guests were struggling into their uniforms or civvies and hurrying down the stairs. By the time I was dressed – bellbottoms are quite complicated when it comes to getting them on in a hurry – Lord Kestrel, still in his pyjamas, was standing on the right of his front steps shouting abuse at the departing orgiasts while on his left Reggie, who had . by this time put on an expensive silk dressing-gown I had watched him choose in Burlington Arcade, was apologising profusely for his father’s boorishness and asking us all to be sure to telephone him next day. As it was far too late to bother anyone else, I staggered as far as the Union Jack Club, where there was luckily a bed available. I woke next morning at 7am in time to catch the sailors’ all-night-in train back to Chatham, to discover that everyone else in the large dormitory was Chinese, a rather unnerving experience while suffering from a ferocious hangover. I rang Reggie later; he said his father had calmed down, and I was perfectly at liberty to come and stay with him the following weekend. I did so, taking with me, as a precaution, some flowers for Lady Kestrel. Although as monosyllabic as usual, Lord Kestrel made no reference to the event.

So warm was my reception that I felt emboldened to open my ditty box and get out a copy of
The Liverpolitan,
a small monthly magazine which had accepted two of my articles: one on why I loved Liverpool, the other on a British Council exhibition of Paul Klee which I’d seen on leave a month before. I was very proud of these pieces and suggested I read them both aloud to Lady Kestrel, who was polite enough to listen without yawning and to compliment me at the end. I was even more delighted, however, when on a visit to David Webster a day or two later, I found I’d no need to open my little case. With what in retrospect strikes me as kindly tact, he had placed
The Liverpolitan
on the top of a pile of other publications on a low glass table. ‘I’ve read your little pieces, dear,’ he said as he poured me out a drink. ‘The Klee piece is a tiny bit naive but the Why-I-love-Liverpool bit has something.’ He picked it up and opened it. ‘You do go on about the poetry of the local
patois
rather too much,’ he complained, ‘but I quite like the rest.’ He began to chuckle. ‘ “When on leave in London”,’ he read out, ‘ “I have a very gay time”. Now that, dear, I’m inclined to believe, but you really shouldn’t let everybody know…’ I nodded but I didn’t really know what he was talking about. I’d never heard the word ‘gay’ at that time. ‘Queer’ was in more general use even among homosexuals – and indeed above his desk David had hung, firmly between inverted commas, one of those pokerwork mottoes of the kind displayed behind the bar by facetious publicans. It read: ‘All the world is queer except for me and thee and even thee’s a little queer!’ I actually found David over-critical, as indeed I had while rehearsing Lady Macbeth with him three years before. (‘He is willing to listen to any amount of praise,’ wrote Pa Watt, the art master, in one of my reports, ‘but seems unable to believe that anything less than complimentary could possibly refer to him.’) Nevertheless, he placated me by adding that, no doubt, after my demob I would ‘take his place in Liverpool’. I was by this time already beginning to think that I must live in London anyway and yet, remembering what a glamorous figure David had seemed to me as a child and adolescent, I could not help but be pleased.

The reason I’d gone to see David on this occasion was actually practical. Covent Garden was to reopen. He had offered my mother two tickets and she had decided to come down and take me. I was thrilled about my mother coming and excited about introducing her to all the friends I’d made and all the places I’d been. I thanked David warmly, and returned to Reggie, who was lying, looking rather put out, in a hot scented bath.

The reason Reggie was put out was that he had discovered he had caught a dose of crabs and, probably correctly, blamed me. I feigned frivolity.

‘That’ll teach you,’ I said, ‘to sleep with the Lower Deck.’

I was, even so, rather humiliated. There was something distinctly unpleasant about finding oneself not only a host to parasites but a transmitter to boot. Immediately he’d told me, I began to itch, and a short search was rewarded. I looked with fascinated repulsion at the almost transparent creature, no bigger than a pinhead, wriggling its legs on the black marble wash basin. I knew about crabs, of course: they were very much part of naval mythology and were referred to by such synonyms as ‘fanny rats’, ‘minge mice’, ‘mobilised blackheads’ and ‘mechanised dandruff, but to have heard about them was quite different from catching them. Tasked Reggie what you did to get rid of them. He told me rather snappily that he would go to his doctor, but that the best thing I could do was to report to sick bay.

Luckily before taking his advice I confided in Wings. ‘If you do that,’ he told me, ‘they’ll shave your bush off, paint you bright fucking blue and confine you on board for a fucking week. There’s a chemist in Chatham High Street that’ll settle for the buggers.’

I was more than grateful to Wings, as with Covent Garden opening only two days ahead the last thing I wanted was to sit on the
Argus
with no pubic hair and azure balls!

I found the chemist on the way to meet my mother forty-eight hours later. I told him what was the matter and he invited me into his back room which was full of stacked boxes of wartime lavatory paper, Cow & Gate rusks and cartons of Brylcreem. He had a jar of white ointment with him and a little brush. It was clear that he enjoyed this profitable side-line. I dropped my trousers and he made a quick and expert inspection.

‘Oh yes, sir,’ he said, ‘you
have
got ’em!’ As he applied the ointment he told me that I was lucky to catch them early. ‘I had a Petty Officer in last week,’ he said. ‘Now ’e’d neglected them for weeks. They’d got up into ’is chest ’air, ’is armpits
and
’is beard.’ The ointment stung quite badly but then died away to become a rather pleasant glow not unlike that experienced a few minutes after a school beating. It had a chemical smell just verging on the pungent.

‘Don’t pull your trousers up yet, sir,’ he advised. ‘Let it work its way into t’roots. That’s where they lay their eggs.’ He went into the shop to sell a lady some toothpaste and a hairnet. He came back, dived into my bush and pulled out a dead crab, which he showed me, with all the pride of a successful fisherman, on the top of one of the cardboard boxes.

‘There you are, sir,’ he said. ‘Dead as a bloody doornail. You can get dressed again now.’

I did so with some relief. It struck me that he was almost certainly a closet queen, and that part of his interest in the slaughter of crab-lice was that it enabled him to handle the genitalia of the Fleet. As I did up the front flap of my bellbottoms he said something to confirm this and to make me very glad that I had given him no encouragement to pounce.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ he observed, ‘you’re very well hung, sir!’ Admittedly rather flattered, I ignored this ploy, paid him five shillings and left to catch the train and pick up my mother, who was staying for several days with one of those Jewish cousins of hers whom I had lately chosen to ignore.

The reopening of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was an extraordinarily glamorous affair. Admittedly there was a strong smell of mothballs and the choice of
The Sleeping Beauty
seemed particularly apt as, with clothes rationing still very much in force, most of the women seemed to have recently awoken from a spell of at least six years’ duration. Even so jewels, redeemed from bank vaults, sparkled like miniature versions of the great chandeliers above, and famous faces acknowledged each other at every turn. Standing aside at one moment to let a gentleman pass through a doorway I, or more likely my uniform, was rewarded by a dazzling smile from Noel Coward.

After a satisfactory gawp in the bar, along the passages and on the staircases, we took our seats. Programmes rustled. We rose for latecomers who apologised their way along the rows. The musicians infiltrated the orchestra pit and tuned up. The conductor entered and acknowledged his applause, and we stood again for a roll of drums heralding simultaneously the National Anthem and the arrival of the Royal party. Standing ovation for same: the King looking tired and drawn, the Queen smiling.as if at intimate friends; acknowledgement of my mother’s confession that she felt ‘quite chokey’; self-censorship of the fact that I, the Surrealist-Anarchist, felt the same; the dimming of the lights; the clearing of throats and discreet release of waistcoat buttons grown tighter during the duration; heightened excitement at the dramatic effect of the footlights on the great red curtains with their gold ciphers at the corners; the buzz of conversation dying in an instant at the triple click of the conductor’s baton and then, at last, with that unique urgency of music heard in a theatre, an experience quite different from that in any concert hall, the opening chords of Tchaikovsky’s overture throbbed out into the rosy darkness of the auditorium.

I quite enjoyed the ballet; it was an enthusiasm of my mother’s which, during my adolescence and my total identification with her interests, I had persuaded myself I had shared, although even then I had preferred modern works like
Façade
to the great classical three-acters with their swans and Willis. Now that I was trying to sever, or at any rate stretch, that psychological umbilical cord, I had come to admit to reservations. Besides I had learned from Mesens of Breton’s disaproval of the art as a ‘bourgeois spectacle’ and of how, when Diaghilev had commissioned Ernst and Miró to design the set and costumes for Constant Lambert’s
Romeo and
Juliet,
the two artists had been temporarily excluded from the movement and the Surrealists had made a noisy protest from the floor. I’d no intention of doing that, but reminded myself to warn my mother not to mention where we’d been to Mesens when I introduced them next day. Meanwhile I tolerated the ‘bourgeois spectacle’, slightly alarmed by the thought that there might be some parasitic life still active in my pubic hair.

My mother stayed several days in London, her first visit since the war finished, and I was determined to demonstrate my worldliness and
savoir faire.
The meeting with Reggie was a great success. He was exactly the sort of queen she liked, witty and friendly and with a potential title as well, but the meeting with Mesens was far less successful. Edouard took us to The Ivy, by which she was quite impressed because of its theatrical reputation but, whereas she found Sybil very sympathetic, ELT’s tendency to ‘hold the floor non-stop’, as she put it, bored her to distraction. She thought him ‘heavy going’ and ‘opinionated’ and, knowing little and caring less about Surrealism, she found the evening to be something of a strain.