Still Standing: The Savage Years (29 page)

I gave the police some cock and bull story, hastily made up as I went along, which they seemed satisfied with, and happily they never came back.

The Goldsmiths was a mixed pub popular with the students from the college that rather snootily didn’t book drag acts. Adrella and I had got together to form a double act called High Society that he’d once been in with David Dale. I didn’t fancy jigging around in a leotard miming to
Cats
or prancing around with no wig on to ‘Sweet Transvestite’, so the ideas and numbers Peter (Adrella) and David had used that had made the act so popular were quickly abandoned for new ones.

We both wanted to do more live work. It was silly not to, as it was obvious by the reception we both got in the Vauxhall that that was what the audience wanted, but even so, as a safety precaution and to pad out the show, we’d throw a couple of mime numbers in.

Nigel, the pianist from the Piano Bar in Brewer Street, made some backing tracks for us to sing along to. I was reticent at first about singing in public but Peter talked me into it and we picked songs that were easy to fake. ‘Oom-Pah-Pah’ from Oliver was popular as I could sing it in what I thought was a raucous cockney accent. ‘Don’t Tell Mama’ from
Cabaret
was also a great opener as it was sung/spoken and the lyrics were so easy to parody:

You can tell our Vera, suits me fine,

Cos she’s in the toilets chopping a line.

But don’t tell Mama what you know.

Peter desperately wanted to do the ‘Mickey Mouse Club March’, complete with mouse ears and banners, but his masterstroke was coming up with the idea of a song for Skippy.

Skippy, you may remember, was a fox fur that I’d turned
into a vent doll. Inexplicably this mangy old fur became a celebrity with an enormous cult following, the cries for Skippy raising the roof of the old Vauxhall every time I appeared there. To keep the momentum going I arranged to have Skippy shot by an unknown assailant, resulting in a headline on the front page of
Capital Gay
demanding ‘Who Shot Skippy?’ and a subsequent queue down to the Oval to get into the Vauxhall on a Thursday night. There were all sorts of theories as to who actually did the dirty deed, which I kept going for a few weeks until the actual culprit was finally revealed as Lily’s evil half-sister (me in a black wig) whose motive was hatred born out of jealousy for her sex kitten sibling and who has strangely enough never been seen or heard of since.

High Society made their debut at the Union Tavern, the show running for over four hours. Coerced into doing my Cleo Laine impression I sang ‘Who Can I Turn To?’ while a bemused audience watched and wondered why I was doing Anthony Newley in a curly wig and purple kaftan. We also did our mind-reading act with Peter as the Svengali figure wandering around the audience holding items up for me to guess what they were, while I sat on stage wearing a paper bag over my head as Mrs Lilian Stokes, international psychic, guessing to the audience’s surprise each item correctly, thanks to a clever code which if I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.

Despite missing their last bus home the audience were very kind and the act went down well, particularly Skippy’s performance of ‘Manamana’, which had the place going wild and provided me with a great way to close the act for many a year to come. Skippy the infallible crowd-pleaser was guaranteed to get them going even if I was dying on my arse. Skippy even gave birth to a stoat called Damien, a piece of
vermin Chrissie had found in a drawer at May’s and one that lived up to its namesake. I’d wheel this thing on in a baby buggy and have it spout the juicier lines, courtesy of a tape as it couldn’t really speak, from the film
The Exorcist
.

Maggie offered us a residency at the Union every Sunday night and Pat, who knew when he was on to a good thing, offered us one at the Vauxhall on Mondays, which meant I was now working there three nights a week. It was little wonder that customers of the Vauxhall thought that I part owned it.

Despite the current atmosphere of anti-gay and Aids hysteria whipped up by the media, the politicians and the religious maniacs, and the increasing number of deaths from Aids-related illnesses of our friends and loved ones, morale was high. Gays and lesbians in general are a pretty tough breed, an indefatigable lot (we’ve had to be), able to deal with and adapt to any given situation.

I was optimistic. Life was good along south London’s Barbary Coast on the rue de la South Lambeth, and I was earning good money, not surprising since I was at it from nine in the morning until midnight most days. Murphy had convinced me it was time to go professional and really make a go of it with Lily. My friend Beryl Chyat had also had a hand in my taking the plunge, pulling me quietly aside one day into one of the interview rooms at work.

‘Is there something you’ve neglected to tell me?’ she said, coming straight to the point as usual. ‘Are you doing a drag act called Lily Savage?’

She handed me a copy of
Tomorrow
, a short-lived magazine that Katharine Hamnett had launched featuring me, Hush and David Dale in a photo strip entitled ‘The Sex Kittens’, which was, to coin a well-used phrase, big in Japan.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, waving the offending article under my nose.

I came clean and confessed. Beryl was livid that I hadn’t told her earlier and was straight down to the Vauxhall that Thursday to witness ‘Stars of the Future’ for herself.

The next day I asked her if she’d enjoyed it, not that I had to as she was clearly ecstatic, still riding high from the circus the night before.

‘You know you’re moonlighting,’ she said solemnly after she’d calmed down.

‘I know. That’s why I kept it quiet. D’ya think they’d sack me if they found out?’ I asked.

‘No, you daft beggar,’ she said, slapping me on the arm, ‘this is the moonlighting job, working for Camden. It’s Savage you should be concentrating all your time and effort on. Give this up.’

And so I eventually did, but not without a lot of soul-searching and angst at the thought of becoming self-employed. On the flip side, though, I told myself at three in the morning as I sat on the front room floor writing material to reassure myself that I could do it, I would be my own boss, answerable to nobody, able to sleep all day and stay out of a night, hopefully earning good money in the process.

Splicing together all the gems that I’d come out with at the Vauxhall – those that I could remember, that is – and the stuff I’d been scribbling down over the past few months, I managed to glean enough material for what I supposed was a fifteen-minute act, nowhere near enough I knew, but sufficient to try out at a birthday celebration at the George IV, an East End pub I’d been asked to appear at.

I’d been fortunate to have a deep well of material to draw
from lately thanks to Vera’s re-emergence, minus a tooth, from the wilds of Yorkshire and safe return to the Black Cap as a live-in barman, and a couple of Chrissie’s friends who had recently arrived unexpectedly at the crack of dawn one morning from Birkenhead saying they were ‘laying low for a while’. Chrissie was furious at first when Irene and Karen turned up on his doorstep unannounced but soon thawed out once Irene had rustled up a docker’s breakfast followed by a strong pot of tea and a copious supply of fags and news from home.

They were a pair of lovable rogues, two tough ladies who had spent a fair amount of time enjoying Her Majesty’s hospitality as a result of their habit of taking things from shops without paying. They were inveterate and highly skilled shoplifters and could spot a floor walker in a department store blindfolded, and both Murphy and I loved them. For me it felt like being with members of my tribe again, hearing that familiar accent rattle around the landings of the Mansions, enjoying sessions around Chrissie’s kitchen table listening to conversations that were pure comedy joy. Each time Irene popped round to my flat she’d ‘just throw the mop around while I’m here’ as she was incapable of keeping still. It was like getting a visit from the ‘how to turn a dump into a home’ fairy, for she possessed the ability to sort order out of chaos and transform a room into somewhere that suddenly felt homely. It was comforting sitting on the sofa watching the condensation running down the windows from the steam emanating from the kitchen and listening to Irene ‘just boiling this bit of cabbage and throwing a bit of dinner in the oven while I’m here’.

The stories about her life that she told me kept me in material for months. She was blissfully unaware of just how funny she was, and her tale of the day she had her coil
removed, a form of contraception previously unfamiliar to me that she described as a device having the dimensions of an electricity pylon from which she swore she sometimes heard voices, was a godsend. I took this tragic-comic tale, warped it, and that night Lily was picking up Radio Luxembourg and taxi messages on her coil, much to her embarrassment, as she stood next to a microwave in the queue to pay her bill in the Electricity Board showroom.

Irene came banging frantically on my front door one night wearing just her bra and knickers and a headful of Carmen rollers, shouting that Chrissie’s flat was on fire. I gave her a coat and together we ran over to Chrissie’s flat to find thick black smoke belching out of the open front door and Chrissie emerging in a pair of baggy long johns and a blackened face covered in soot screaming, ‘Evacuate the building!’

He’d put the chip pan on and forgotten about it, distracted by a film he was watching on the telly, and it wasn’t till the flames came licking around the living room door that he remembered. Thankfully the fire brigade arrived extremely quickly and put the blazing pan out, but the resulting damage rendered the flat uninhabitable and forced Chrissie to vacate temporarily to a neighbour’s. Some evil queen reported back to him that I’d been laughing about it in the Vauxhall, which I had, as the memory of a black-faced Chrissie in long johns still makes me laugh today when I think of it, but Chrissie was highly offended that I found the matter funny and didn’t speak to me for months.

The birthday show at the George IV in the East End went extremely well, the fifteen minutes’ worth of material I’d worked out lasting over forty-five when I got out there. Time just flew and when I came off I apologized to the compère,
Lee Paris, for overrunning. He didn’t mind in the least. A few acts hadn’t turned up and there was plenty of time that needed filling.

Lee Paris had been working the south London pubs for years. He was one of the first acts I saw when I arrived in London and the sight of him flying down the bar of the Vauxhall on a pair of roller skates was not something you got to see every day. He offered me a bit of advice.

‘You’re very good, dear,’ he said. ‘Don’t bury yourself in the Vauxhall. Get out and do the rounds. Take all the work you can get.’

And I did.

From a source around the back of the Mansions in Dorset Road Irene ‘just happened’ to find herself in possession of a large collection of brand new bed sets – matching duvet cover, sheet and pillowcases – which sat stacked up to the ceiling in Chrissie’s front room until Irene could think of a way to shift them.

‘Can’t you do something?’ Chrissie moaned one morning from a gap in the multicoloured bedding that lined the room, completely surrounding him as he sat on what was left of the sofa drinking tea and sucking on a fag. ‘Can’t you flog them down the Vauxhall?’

‘Ay, that’s not a bad idea,’ Irene said, running out of the kitchen waving a dishcloth. ‘A tenner each, a bargain at the price and all good quality gear, one hundred per cent cotton with a bit of something else thrown in that washes beautifully and will last a lifetime.’

I remembered this spiel the following Monday night as I announced from the stage after our first act that I would be selling bed sets from the dressing room during the interval. A lengthy queue formed within seconds, prompting Pat to ask,
‘What the feckin’ hell is that bowsy selling up there?’ I did a roaring trade for quite a few weeks until Pat, more than a little concerned about being busted for selling stolen goods, put a stop to it.

I had a great relationship with this genial Irishman who never seemed to let anything faze him. One Christmas Eve, after a particularly boozy lock-in, he mislaid the takings. As business had been more than brisk the money bag contained a substantial amount of cash. Pat was beside himself, but after searching the pub from top to bottom ten times over without uncovering the missing cash he could only conclude that someone had stolen it, which cast a bit of a shadow over the Christmas night party.

Since I worked the place so often I’d been elevated from the ground floor dressing cupboard and given a bathroom for my own personal use upstairs. I kept a few costumes in here, piled up in the bath, and on the occasions when I ran out of Cremine I’d run along the hall and nick a bit of cooking oil from Breda’s chip pan that did the job but left me smelling strongly of fried food. That night, the big holdall that I kept my drag in lay at the side of the bath where I’d left it, and reaching inside to see if I had any tights that were wearable I came across a large bag containing a wad of notes. It was the missing money, but what was it doing in my bag? I lit a fag and tried to recall what had happened after the pub had closed on Christmas Eve, and slowly the series of events that led to the case of the missing money began, as Mrs Christie would say, to unfold.

Pat was a man who could hold his liquor but on that Christmas Eve, like the rest of us, he had seriously partaken of the Christmas spirit. On his way to put the takings in the safe he’d dropped by the bathroom for a chat and dumped
the bag of money on the edge of the bath. It must have slipped down into my bag while he indulged in a bit of play boxing, which he was wont to do when he’d had a few scoops. I had a bottle of whisky with me, and by the time we went downstairs to the bar we had forgotten all about the money. The look on his face when I returned it to him was a picture, and it made his Boxing Day.

I’d had a great year, one of the best of my life so far, but it was to be the lull before the storm. Like many others, I wasn’t prepared for the horror and devastation that lay in wait just around the corner, and blissfully unaware of what loomed ahead I enjoyed every minute of every day.