Still Standing: The Savage Years (21 page)

‘C’mon,’ he said cheerfully after we’d unpacked, ‘get that
beard shaved off, wench, and let’s have Miss Savage back.’

Copenhagen in May was a lot livelier than when we’d last been here. The city had shed its winter coat and put its party frock on. We’d arrived just in time for the carnival and Hush and I took to the streets dressed as Snow White and the Queen. While the kids might have enjoyed the sight of a six-foot-three Snow White and her equally lofty stepmother, I was beginning to regret my choice of costume as the weather was balmy and it wasn’t much fun dragging a heavy black velvet cloak around the streets, sweating like a whore in confession under a cowl and tin crown. I went back to the club to get changed, bumping into Lisa on the stairs.

‘Where are you going? Get back out on the streets,’ she roared, sounding like a madam ordering one of her girls about. Even though it was only two in the afternoon it was easy to see that she was already more than half cut as one eye was looking at me while the other was looking vacantly at the wall. I tried to explain I was getting changed as it was too hot, but she was having none of it and insisted that I put something else on.

‘It’s carnival,’ she shouted, breaking into a frenzied dance and losing her shoe in the process. ‘The Danes are stodgy,’ she slurred, leaning against the wall for support as she tapped around the floor with her foot to find her shoe and missing it by miles. ‘This is only the second carnival to be held here and we need to show them how it’s done! Let’s liberate the people!’

Well in that case, I thought, it would be priggish to ignore this call to arms so I dumped the Wicked Queen and got into my hooker’s outfit, which was comfortable and, as there was hardly anything of it, would undoubtedly be a lot cooler than a velvet cloak. Our first port of call was the Why Not bar across the street where she ordered two Jägermeisters. As Lisa
was about to down her glass in one, a drunk backed into her, knocking the glass out of her hand and setting off an angry argument between them. The drunk suddenly lunged at Lisa, grabbing her by the hair, and as there was an enormous ashtray sitting on the bar doing nothing I let him have it – unfortunately just as two Politi happened to be coming down the stairs.

The drunk made a terrible racket and as he had no idea where the blow had come from started lashing out indiscriminately at everyone around him. Within seconds the Why Not, normally a fairly reserved little bar, had transformed into a Wild West saloon. In the midst of the melee we managed to evade one of the coppers, who was fighting his way through the crowd and making a beeline for me. We escaped into the street and vanished among the mass of people outside, not easy when you’re wearing a wig bigger than the Hindenburg.

‘That was fun,’ Lisa cackled above the racket of the drums, a monotonous rhythm beaten in unison by the crowd. ‘What next? How about we hit the Tivoli Gardens?’

I turned her down and instead headed back to our digs above the club to change into mufti and avoid a possible arrest.

‘Be adventurous in life, but not in restaurants’ is my maxim and I always order dishes that I know, unable to see the point in spending good money experimenting on a previously unfamiliar dish only to find it’s inedible. So having lunch with Hush one day in a restaurant in the Tivoli Gardens I ordered sole, considering it a safe option.

To my horror, when this dish was served up, the fish still had its head, tail and every bone in its body. Revolted, I
picked at it half-heartedly with my fork, rooting among the exceedingly bony framework of this monster for some flesh, even though I had no intention of eating any. To make matters worse, this fish bore an expression of abject misery, as if it had died of fright and in excruciating pain. It was like looking at an aquatic autopsy.

‘Something wrong with the fish?’ the dominatrix masquerading as a waitress asked, hovering menacingly over me. ‘It’s fresh. Very nice. Now eat it.’

It was a threat, not a request, and instead of telling her that I’d like it served sans head and tail and off the bone I sheepishly assured her that there was nothing wrong and I was just about to eat it.

‘I hope you do,’ she said, making her way back to the kitchen, probably to get a meat cleaver to decapitate me with.

‘What am I going to do?’ I hissed. Hush sat opposite me, tucking into his steak with no problem at all.

‘Leave it on the plate if you don’t want it,’ he replied, not understanding my panic.

I hate complaining in restaurants, always have and always will, and I’m absolutely hopeless when it comes to sending anything back. I’ve gone to extraordinary lengths over the years to hide the evidence of an uneaten meal and escape the inevitable ‘Is there anything wrong with your meal, sir?’ from the waiter. I’ve surreptitiously swiped many an undercooked steak off the plate and into a tissue, smuggling it out in my pocket and dumping it once I’m a safe distance from the restaurant.

The Tivoli Gardens fish was going to be a bit of a problem to smuggle out. It was an enormous beast that only just fitted on the plate, so there was no shoving this distant relative of Moby Dick in my jeans pocket. Weighing up the options, I
took the only one available to me and when I thought no one was looking I slung the fish into the hedge next to the table.

‘You enjoyed the fish then?’ Irma Grese’s aunty asked suspiciously when she returned to clear our table and saw my empty plate. ‘You must have been hungry, very hungry indeed.’

‘I was indeed very hungry,’ I answered cheerily, rubbing my stomach like a kids’ presenter doing Little Tommy Tucker to demonstrate how full up I was.

‘Very hungry indeed,’ she mocked, looking into the hedge, ‘to have eaten all the bones and the head and tail as well. Do you want dessert? Coffee?’ she enquired.

‘No thanks,’ I mumbled before an outraged Hush could ask to see the dessert menu. ‘Just the bill.’

‘Do you know what to do?’ she asked slyly when she brought it.

‘How do you mean?’ I muttered.

‘You just leave the money on the plate, you don’t have to hide it in the hedge.’ As she walked away she added, ‘Is that an English custom?’

Needless to say she didn’t get a tip. Apart from the breakfasts, which I loved, I didn’t have much luck with food in Denmark.

When we got back to England I found I was homeless again. Andy had reclaimed his flat but thankfully Chrissie offered to put me up. This musical flats game was becoming very wearing but at least Chrissie’s flat was pleasant. He’d inherited it from a very nice dental nurse who’d decorated it in shades of beige and magnolia with an oatmeal fitted carpet throughout.

‘Beige,’ Chrissie snorted in disgust, ‘the hallmark of the bourgeoisie,’ and set about redecorating in his own inimitable
style courtesy of the skips of London. His first acquisition was a faux medieval wrought-iron chandelier that was far too big for the front room, and once all twenty-eight candles were lit it became a positive death trap. Still, it looked nice and as Chrissie said it saved on the electricity, not that our bills were high as he’d drilled a hole in the side of the meter and stuck a needle in to stop the wheel going round. Suspended from this needle on a length of cotton was a miniature Eiffel Tower acting as a weight, effective but a dead giveaway as to Chrissie’s game, and I was threatened on pain of death never to open the door to strangers in case it was the leccy man.

It was time to go back to my proper job at Camden. Instead of returning to the peripatetic team, I was reassigned to the offices of Area One on Theobald’s Road as the powers that be were worried that my dislocated knee was not up to the heavy work required of a peri. This suited me down to the ground as working nine to five in a very pleasant office would leave me free to perform in the pubs of an evening.

Hush and I occasionally teamed up with David Dale as an act called LSD: nothing to do with hallucinogenic drugs or pre-decimalization coinage, it stood for Lily, Sandra and Doris. We resurrected and improved some of the old Disapointer Sisters routines and I spent weeks editing a
Watch With Mother
sketch with Doris as Andy Pandy, Hush as Looby Loo and me as Teddy. I had an extremely primitive editing suite involving a video player and a tape recorder set up in the front room and would sit on the floor with one eye on the television and the other on the pause button of the tape machine, cobbling together lines from various episodes of
Andy Pandy
. It was worth it in the end but the effort nearly drove me and Chrissie insane.

‘I’m going out,’ he’d snap, slapping Oil of Ulay on his face
in the mirror over the gas fire. ‘That woman’s voice saying the same thing over and over again, day in, day friggin’ out, is going to put me in the mental ward.’

The BBC and the lovely Vera McKechnie, the lady who narrated the
Andy Pandy
series and a childhood heroine of mine, would undoubtedly have sued if they had known what I was making of their much treasured and fondly remembered kiddies’ series.

‘Look at Teddy, boys and girls, what can he be looking for?’ Vera would say as Teddy on screen ponced about the garden in search of something he’d misplaced. Cut to the stage of the Vauxhall Tavern and me dressed as Teddy, rooting in an oversized handbag for a bottle of amyl nitrite.

‘What has he got there?’ Vera would enquire as I triumphantly produced the amyl and rammed it up my nose.

‘Why look! See how he’s sniffing it,’ Vera would giggle, referring to Teddy’s encounter with a flower in the garden from a different episode.

On cue I’d totter about the stage and bounce off the walls, supposedly out of my mind.

‘See how high he’s gone!’ Vera would chuckle from yet another episode when Teddy had a go on a swing. ‘What will Andy say when he gets back, boys and girls? I should imagine he’ll have a go and try to get higher than Teddy.’

As for our reinterpretation of ‘The Jumping Song’ involving me, Andy and Looby … well, it would’ve given the head of BBC children’s broadcasting a seizure. Even though the sketch was extremely rude it was done with great affection and never failed to go down a storm with the audience.

We also did a big burlesque opening routine years before the genre had a revival and became fashionable, with the three of us traipsing around as worn-out, hard-bitten Minsky
chorus girls, culminating with me on a violin bumping and grinding to ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’. At my insistence we even did a spot of Irish dancing long before the
Riverdance
phenomenon, flying around the stage in wild red wigs and lurid emerald-green Irish dancing dresses run up by Hush, to a rousing version of ‘Lanigan’s Ball’ until we were fit to drop dead. As a drag act I suppose you could say we were a bit before our time.

We loved working in Edinburgh. There was a gay club on Princes Street called Fire Island with a very appreciative audience. They loved our ‘Blood Women’ routine, much to Hush’s dismay as it involved getting messy, smearing Kensington Gore – fake blood bought from Fox’s in Covent Garden – all over our faces and wigs and donning cheap blood-soaked nighties. Hush didn’t like getting messy and was appalled at the idea of appearing on any stage, no matter how humble, looking anything less than 100 per cent glamorous perfection.

Doris had been doing Jennifer Hudson’s ‘And I Am Telling You’ in his solo act, giving the number a macabre twist by appearing as a woman scorned, more than a little deranged and brandishing a carving knife, the bloody evidence of the violent demise of her lover splattered all over her. Doris would encourage us to cover ourselves in the fake blood but the furthest the reluctant Hush ever went was to delicately apply a couple of tiny smears across his cheek and a few cursory dabs on his hands. I’d sling it liberally all over myself as I enjoyed getting messy but I never went as far as Doris, who would literally pour an entire bottle over his head and even take a good mouthful, spewing it out all down his already saturated nightie.

Getting it all off after the show was usually a nightmare.
Dressing rooms were primitive and we were very lucky if there was a sink on hand. Even so, there was never any hot water and getting the sticky sweet-smelling Kensington Gore off with cold water and no soap was virtually impossible so we invariably went home with our skin stained a bright pink. This Kensington Gore wasn’t cheap either and we were going through gallons of the stuff. Even though we were supposed to take it in turns to buy it, just lately the task seemed to have been left to me. I’d noticed one morning as I was sorting out the drag case that there was only half a bottle left and as we were working in Bournemouth that night once again I took myself of to Fox’s, complaining to Fred behind the counter about the expense.

‘What are you doing with the stuff? Decorating the front room with it?’ he asked. ‘I’m not surprised it’s costing you a fortune, you’re buying the champagne of Kensington Gore,’ he explained. ‘There’s a much cheaper one available, twice the size, almost a quarter of the price and just as good. Thicker and much more glutinous, if you catch my drift, not that I’m an expert on gaping wounds gushing oceans of viscous blood, thank heavens. So come on then, which one do you want?’

Needless to say it was the cheaper brand I took home on the 88 bus.

That night in Bournemouth Hush and I used up what was left of the old bottle, leaving the cheaper but untested new stuff for Doris. He drenched himself in it as usual but after the show found it impossible to remove. It clung to his skin like gloss paint and even though the management had supplied us with a comfortable room with a shower to get changed in (the club was below a gay hotel), no matter how long he scrubbed himself under a scalding shower the fake blood refused to budge. To add to his mounting fury and
frustration he was on a promise and was anxious to get back down to the club in case his beau lost interest and went home.

Eventually, an hour and a half and two cans of Vim applied vigorously with a scrubbing brush later, Doris made his entrance into the club. The Vim might have removed the fake blood but it had left his skin with a deathly vampiric pallor tinged with blue. He glowed under the club lighting but it didn’t seem to put the totty off. Maybe he was into vampires who smelt like well-scrubbed kitchen sinks.