Still Standing: The Savage Years (4 page)

I explain to her that as we’ve only got fifteen minutes I’d find myself hard pushed to tell her exactly what happened over the last three decades, but I give her a potted version anyway as I like her.

‘I always secretly wanted to be famous,’ she volunteers, comfortable with me now and opening up. ‘It must be wonderful.’

‘Now look,’ I lecture her, ‘don’t end up as one of those fame-hungry columnists whose ego and photographs are bigger than the crap they write and who would sell their firstborn for two minutes’ exposure on daytime telly or one of those awful bloody “list” programmes pontificating on subjects you have no idea about with a load of telly critics and alternative comics that nobody’s heard of.’

She laughs at this and assures me that she plans to stay in her chosen profession and she’d never be able to go on stage anyway as she’d be so terrified.

I confess that my first experience in front of a crowd with a mike in my hand was pretty hair-raising.

‘Where was that?’ she asks.

‘Well, the first time I actually spoke and cracked a couple of gags was in a pub in the north but I suppose you could say that it all began in a couple of south London pubs.’

‘What were the pubs called? When was it? What did you wear? Did Lily appear fully formed or was she organic?’

‘She was never organic,’ I tell her. ‘She only ate processed foods, believing that the preservatives contained in them were a powerful aid to maintaining her youthful beauty.’

‘Oh no, I didn’t mean organic food, I—’

‘I know what you meant,’ I say. ‘Lily was like Topsy. She just growed.’

‘Pardon?’

‘
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.’

Vera reappears armed with soup and sarnies. ‘You better get a move on,’ he warns me. ‘Have you seen the time? You haven’t even got your slap on yet.’

‘I wish we could talk all afternoon,’ the woman from the magazine says, reluctant to hang up. ‘I’d love to hear more about the Lily years, the early ones working the clubs.’

‘I’ll write it down for you,’ I tell her, anxious to get off the phone.

And I have. And here it is. My original intention was to go up to the present day and I’ve finally managed it … sort of, even if I have had to skip a few years. Try as I may – and believe me, I have, to the point of dementia on occasions – I can’t fit it all into one book.
War and Peace
isn’t as long as my trilogy of autobiographies, nor is
The Lord of the
bloody
Rings
, and I feel slightly embarrassed at having stretched it out over three volumes. It’s not for reasons of vanity I’ve done this, nor is it purely for financial gain, it’s due to this compulsion I have to write it all down in detail, and if it weren’t for those two strapping male nurses entering my ward at this very moment with a hypodermic needle containing the powerful sedative required to enable them to prise the laptop out of my hand, I probably would go on for eternity …

CHAPTER 1

1980

‘I THOUGHT YOU
were a couple of strippers,’ the landlord of the latest dump we were working in announced, arms folded, across the bar. ‘We only have strippers of a lunchtime, not drag.’

‘Well, my partner here does a strip,’ I said, trying not to sound desperate, which we were, having no money at all, not even enough to buy a gallon of petrol for the clapped-out van parked on the pavement outside to get us home from this crummy run-down pub we’d been booked into on a wet Tuesday afternoon on the outskirts of Leeds.

‘I most certainly do not strip,’ Hush said indignantly, his face flushing red.

‘You do, what about “Put The Blame On Mame”? You strip to that.’ I was determined not to leave this pub without going on and collecting the thirty-quid fee.

‘I don’t know,’ the landlord said, eyeing up the six-foot-two, built like a lumberjack Hush dubiously. ‘I don’t think a grown man stripping would go down very well with the lads in here.’

Two of the ‘lads’, leaning on the bar and staring into space
over their pints of bitter, slowly turned and glowered at us, as if in affirmation.

‘Go on,’ I wheedled, trying to mask the desperation in my voice with a forced joviality. ‘We’re very funny and I do a strip.’ I was trying not to sound irritable as I attempted to reason with this oik. ‘Look, we’re here now, and besides, where are you going to get another act at such short notice?’

‘Well, it does leave me two strippers short,’ he said, scratching the back of his head and chewing his lower lip. ‘I normally have four on of a lunchtime.’

‘It’ll be a change for the punters,’ I added hopefully.

‘Go on then, I’ll give it a go,’ he said, already regretting his decision. ‘But what’s the odds you die on your bloody arse.’

Hush’s face was still burning scarlet and his lips were pursed tighter than a cat’s anus.

‘Do you have a dressing room?’ he asked grandly, picking up a bin-liner stuffed full of wigs on polystyrene heads. ‘Or somewhere we can get ready in?’ He emphasized the ‘somewhere’ as if he wasn’t expecting too much in the way of facilities.

Surprisingly, not only did this pub have a small ‘stage’ but behind a ratty curtain leading off it was a room for the acts to change in.

‘I’ll kill that bloody Phyllis,’ Hush muttered, referring to Phil, our driver, landlord and temporary manager, picking up the huge sack that held the costumes and marching towards the dressing room. ‘Fancy booking us into this shithole. Why the hell we ever agreed to leave London and live in the middle of nowhere to work venues like this I’ll never know.’

I’d been living in a squat off Camden Square with my two friends, Chrissie and Vera, in the home of a former client, an old lady I’d been looking after when I worked as a peripatetic
care officer for Camden Council. The old lady had died and as we needed somewhere to live after our landlord slapped us with a huge bill for the rates and an increase in rent we couldn’t afford, we moved into her flat as I still had the key. The council eventually got wind and started asking questions that made me worry that I might lose my job if they were to discover that one of their employees was squatting in one of their properties. Abandoning Camden, we moved into a two-bedroom cottage in Purley, the home of another drag act we’d become friendly with. Stage Three, as they were called, consisted of David, John and Jimmy, alias Hush, Connie and Elsie.

I’d been trailing an act called the Glamazons around the pubs for the last six months with a friend called Paul I’d met in the Black Cap. Hush, who was a wizard with wigs and created gowns out of next to nothing, had been making drag for me and Paul. We’d teamed up for benefit nights at the Nashville pub and as we all got on well and needed somewhere to live Hush invited us to move in, making seven of us, including the odd straggler, sharing a tiny cottage. Vera, Paul and I shared a bed and getting up at 6 a.m. every day to make it to work for eight was a pain in the neck.

We moved again, this time to one room in a grim semi-detached in Streatham, with four of us sharing. At least we had our own beds this time but the downside was having four beds in what was formerly someone’s living room didn’t leave a lot of room for anything else. It was claustrophobic living on top of each other like this and one evening I returned home from work to find Paul had gone. Tired of being skint and living in one room, he’d gone off to Saudi to work as an agency nurse without any forewarning. I can’t say I blamed him. The Glamazons hadn’t been getting as much work as
we’d wanted and as it was Paul’s sole source of income it was time for him to move on.

A northern agent by the name of Avril Barton who booked London acts on the northern pub and club circuit had given us a week’s work in pubs in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Avril was small and plump and put me in mind physically of Hylda Baker. As well as acting as an agent she was a catering manageress at Leeds University and shared her flat with a collection of parrots and a couple of moggies whom she doted on. Avril’s passion was a drag act called Billie Raymond, whom she always spoke of as ‘My Billie’. Billie was a very popular and successful act and as far as the adoring Avril was concerned there was no one to touch him. Surprisingly, considering that there was serious unemployment in the north, there was a lot of work for drag acts and Avril claimed that she could guarantee us at least five nights’ work a week, plus a couple of lunchtimes if we moved back up there. ‘Look at my Billie,’ Avril said. ‘Never stops.’ We agreed to return in a month, this time for a two-week stint, and now here I was in a bedsit in Streatham with no act as my partner preferred earning a fabulous wage taking Arab princes’ temperatures to traipsing around the north of England for a pittance.

Hush had fallen out with John and had quit the act. He’d also left the house that they shared, making himself homeless, and so, pooling our losses, I quit my job with Camden, we said goodbye to London and emigrated to Yorkshire. Avril had introduced us to a guy named Phil who put up the acts from London in his flat, driving them around to the different far-flung venues. Phil invited us to move in with him on a permanent basis so he could act as our driver and also as manager.

As both Avril and Phil had promised, there was a lot of
work about, providing you didn’t mind working the occasional toilet for half the fee we were normally going out for. We weren’t fussy, work was work and twenty-five quid was better than nothing but even so, this pub we’d ended up in with its lunchtime strippers won the cigar for being the worst dump in the north-west.

‘This is rock bottom, Savage, this is, not even being able to buy a bevvy,’ Hush moaned with more than a hint of despair in his voice. ‘Since you’re so well in with the management, go and ask him if we can have a sub on the fee so we can get a bloody drink. I’m not going on in here sober.’ He was unpacking costumes from the huge canvas zip-up sack he’d made to carry them all in and was looking for somewhere to hang them.

‘I should’ve ironed this,’ he said, giving his violent orange satin French maid’s outfit a once-over with a critical eye. ‘And typically there’s nowhere to hang it in here to give the creases a chance to drop out.’

‘You think that lot out there are going to care if you’ve got a crease in your skirt?’ I said, bracing myself to go out among ‘that lot’ to see if I could get a couple of drinks on tick. ‘They want filth. Pregnant brides and knicker routines with cucumbers and things.’

‘Well there’s no way I’m stooping to that kind of behaviour,’ Hush snorted indignantly as he attempted to get six costumes on the one solitary rusty nail embedded in the wall. ‘And if this is the level of establishment we’re going to be working in then I’d better start packing some hooks and a hammer. Knicker routines indeed, the very idea.’

‘Go on,’ I goaded, ‘lift your McNamara’s Band frock up and sit on some bloke’s head, it’ll go down a storm.’

‘Certainly not. Now are you going to get the beverage in or what?’

The pub was filling up with a crowd of men who didn’t look like they were the type who would enjoy seeing two grown men dressed as Salvationists on a Tuesday afternoon or, for that matter, any other day of the week.

Luckily Phil appeared from behind the curtain. I’d get him to go to the bar.

‘And where’ve you been?’ Hush rounded on him. ‘Savage had to practically beg to go on, the landlord was expecting a couple of strippers and if it wasn’t for Sav here chatting him up we wouldn’t be working this afternoon. You took the booking on the phone, did you tell him that we were drag?’

‘He never asked, I thought he knew,’ Phil said, shrugging his shoulders and not looking in the least bothered.

‘Well he obviously didn’t know, did he? Now if you don’t mind, me and the Sav are gagging for a bevvy so make yourself useful and get us a couple of drinks. Tell him we want a tab.’ Hush took a fiery red wig out of the bin-liner and gave it a severe shaking to loosen it up. ‘Go on then,’ he said, putting the wig back on its polystyrene head. ‘A pint of bitter and a pint of cider please, oh and a couple of packets of crisps, I’m starving.’

Against the wall leaned a wardrobe door with a mirror attached to it. Hush gave it a cursory wipe with his towel and after lighting a fag he began to apply a plastic wax to his eyebrows to hide them. I sat on what was left of a sofa and opened the fishing tackle box that I kept my make-up in and proceeded to slap it on. Whereas Hush’s make-up box was organized and tidy, mine was a health hazard with strange things lurking among the jumble of lipsticks minus their tops and blunt eyebrow pencils smeared with greasy panstick.

‘Have you seen what that sign on the wall says, Sav?’ Hush asked, deftly painting clown-white greasepaint over his flattened eyebrows with a brush.

I had. It was written in bold felt-tip on cardboard and read, ‘Will all strippers please make sure that they are wearing knickers when collecting their wages from the bar.’

Underneath someone had written in pencil, ‘Unless it’s a lock-in.’

And below that scribbled in biro it read, ‘Dawn and Black Janice, first half – Brenda and Kath, lesbian act second half.’

I’d never met a real-life stripper in the flesh, so to speak, never spent time with one socially and was quite excited at the prospect.