That's Another Story: The Autobiography (20 page)

It wouldn’t come out at first and required me to hold on to the bottom of the bag while DT tugged it free. When he finally did so, it came out so suddenly that he went careering backwards and fell on his arse on top of a child’s beach ball, causing it to burst with quite a bang and the child, almost simultaneously, burst into tears. I went immediately to the rescue with my school French, which up until this point I had been fairly proud of.

‘Oh, je me remercie! Pardonnez nous! Nous acheterons un bal nouveau.’

I noticed the man opposite, who had hitherto been engrossed in his barbecue, begin to titter and mutter something into the tent. This brought his wife out, who stood and joined in, both openly staring and enjoying the scene. Then the child’s father came over, and I was off again.

‘Oh, je me remercie! Mon ami est un imb’cile! Pardonnez nous, s’il vous plaıt!’

‘Oh, it’s all right, love, he’s got another one. We thought you were the local theatre group, come to put on a bit of slapstick for us!’ And he laughed a big, fat-bellied, Barnsley laugh. Scooping up the bawling child, he made to leave, but as he passed the spilt contents of the tote bag, he dropped down on to his haunches and, turning over the wooden tent pegs and picking up the not insubstantial wooden mallet that was needed to knock them into the ground, he said, ‘Good God ! Where did you get this from? The Imperial War Museum?’ Another big-bellied laugh. ‘Eh, Maureen, come over here and have a look at this! Jesus! It’s like
Camping Through the Ages
. When was this last used? The Crimea?’

Secretly I was a bit miffed, but putting a brave face on it I joined in with the good humour, and DT and I started to erect the cause of the hilarity. It was made from extremely thick and heavy green canvas and, as we unfolded it, we noticed several mysterious brown stains and a couple of small holes, just to add to its allure, whilst every crease and fold was full of long-dead flies, spiders and cobwebs.

‘Oh! Brought your insect collection with you, have you?’

More laughter, and by now we had attracted a small audience. Putting the tent up then became an activity for the entire camp. The man opposite brought over his mallet and was knocking in the wooden tent pegs, while the Barnsley couple were trying to lay flat the filthy and extremely thin groundsheet, while laughing and marvelling at the age of the thing; it was not sewn in like today’s models, but simply attached to the main tent by a series of toggles and hooks. Finally it was up. We got out our primus stove and I heated up some frankfurters and beans, but every so often a little group would gather and watch us as if we were an exhibit. Going to fetch water in the green canvas bucket with the white rope handle had people fairly rushing from their tents to point and ‘ooh’ and laugh.

We had done well on the first leg of our journey to Dover, securing lifts easily, but when we got to Calais we waited hours for a lift that took us no distance at all, and had to wait some time again until a kindly French lorry driver stopped and took us all the way to Paris. He suggested that DT’s very long hair might be the cause of people’s reluctance to pick us up and if it was cut short we might have more luck. So it was a pretty clean-cut DT who stood on the roadside thumbing a lift to Poitiers the next day and there was a rubbish bin full of red curls on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne.

It was an idyllic holiday. Camping in amongst the cypress trees in the sand-blown site at Arcachon, the hot sun bringing out their clean, astringent scent, and sitting at the pavement cafe’s, sipping huge cups of milky coffee while we observed the passing folk, giving them histories and characters and relationships, passing judgement and laughing is set like crystal in my mind. Even taking into account the antiquated tent and the difficulty with rides - not to mention the Spanish lorry driver who offered us a lift from Arcachon to Calais on the way home and proceeded to molest me as I sat on the engine in the middle, between him and DT, something I tolerated in silence because the lift was so valuable but which I avenged with a quick, sharp knee to the balls in the car park at the ferry terminal while DT was in the lavatory - it set a joyous benchmark for every holiday that has followed since.

From the moment I started at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre, I felt as if I belonged. It was as if I had been struggling uphill in the wrong gear all my life. Now, everything made sense, everything connected and fitted together. However, I did have a little trouble staying awake in the History of Theatre classes, and I tended to dread and try to get out of the make-up classes, which I found a trial because I might have to remove the thick layers of mascara and black kohl eye make-up that I daubed on every morning after removing the previous day’s lot. This was always done in the privacy of the locked bathroom or, in the post-pubic days of Maple Avenue, in the kitchen, with DT under strict instructions to keep out. I hadn’t allowed a single person, except possibly my parents, and then very briefly, to see me devoid of eye make-up for about three years: in fact, from the moment I first started to wear it, when I realised the effect it had on my eyes, making them darker and larger. Without it I thought myself ugly in the extreme. I had, and of course have, tiny eyes; nowadays this rarely crosses my mind but back then we had just come out of the sixties and eyes simply had to be huge. Girls wanted to look like Twiggy, waiflike, flat-chested, stick-limbed, eyes wide with innocence, or more likely starvation, as not many young women had Twiggy’s natural skinniness. So my eye make-up started at my browbone and very nearly finished at my cheek, much in the style of Fenella Fielding, except without the wig. Every time we had a class I would suffer acute embarrassment if I just had to remove a little; I never removed the mascara and I only ever partially removed the kohl. One Sunday morning, in my second year, I was luxuriating in the bath, having washed my face free of probably several days’ worth of eye make-up, when the boyfriend of the girl from upstairs and his mates, having heard from DT that I was having a bath, started banging on the door and demanding to see what I looked like without my make-up.

‘Come on, let’s see you without your war paint!’

I can remember feeling quite sick at the thought of them witnessing the exposing ugliness of my bare face. I lay silently in the bath without moving a muscle, a flannel over my eyes, until they went away, long after the water had gone cold, and I blushed whenever I bumped into them afterwards.

This belief that I became acceptable and attractive to others only when I had emphasised my eyes with a black pencil line went on, but in a less and less extreme way as the years went by, until my thirties and it only stopped completely when I met my husband. It was largely cured, though, by having to be made up for filming. When I first started out, I would go into the make-up bus with a tiny line around my eyes and a very light scraping of mascara, thinking that the make-up artist would never notice, only to have it wiped off almost instantly and dismissed as a bit of ‘slap’ left on from the night before. So, of course, I would try a little less and then a little less still, until it just wasn’t worth it any more, and what a relief it was to finally accept the way I looked.

There are so many legendary tales about famous actors presenting themselves to be made up when already in full slap and I didn’t want to belong to this absurdly deluded band. There was one such story going the rounds about a famous opera singer who was playing a character who wore a wig and, during the course of the story, the wig was to be ripped off to comically reveal that he was really bald. The singer himself was actually bald and wore a full wig at all times to conceal the fact. It was such a sensitive issue that the wig maker for the opera was instructed never to allude to the fact that this man was wearing a wig and to treat him as if it was indeed his real hair. This meant that instead of using his own natural baldness, a bald cap had to be made to fit over his own personal wig and another wig, the one to be ripped off in the course of the action, had to be made to fit over that.

In the second year of make-up classes we turned to the making of Greek masks, which were composed of plaster of Paris. We were sent home with some of the necessary materials to practise making and applying it. Usually people made casts of their arms and legs, but I decided that DT’s penis might be a more interesting appendage to practise on and he, probably thinking it might perk up our sex life, but with a whiff of fear about him, agreed to it.

The first step in the procedure, in order to facilitate the easy removal of the plaster when dry, was to apply Vaseline and, as you might imagine, this also produced an effect that made the member more conducive to the application of the plaster. Once this was on, all we had to do was wait for it to dry. It looked marvellous and we were both thrilled, but probably for entirely different reasons. Some half an hour later, when it was nail-tapping dry, I gingerly began to try to slide it off, but this brought a huge scream from DT. I couldn’t understand it; I had slathered him with Vaseline, but on closer inspection it seemed that some of the hairs on his testicles were deeply embedded in the plaster of Paris.

I tried to get the kitchen scissors that I had been using in between the plaster and the bollocks, but they were too big - the scissors, that is, not the bollocks - although the bollocks were of a decent size, of course . . . And now I’m getting into very hot water. I then tried to employ a pair of nail clippers, but they were too cumbersome and the thought of them clipping his scrotum sent DT into a total panic.

‘We’ll have to go to hospital. They’ll have to cut it off!’

‘Isn’t that a bit drastic?’

‘What? . . . No! I mean cut the plaster off! This isn’t funny!’

He was now shouting and trying to pace around the room with his trousers round his ankles, holding the plaster cast in place so that it wouldn’t pull on his pubes any more than it already was doing. The thought of taking him to the hospital on the bus, trying to conceal this huge white erection protruding rudely from his trousers, was too much. As I watched him shuffle awkwardly back and forth, I had a terrible urge to laugh. The winding round of the plaster of Paris had made his member look almost twice its natural size and, as it was already sizeable, with his long curly hair and beard he resembled one of those little Greek statues that you can buy in tacky tourist shops, of tiny men with disproportionately large phalluses, which are supposed to be fertility symbols.

‘Don’t panic! Someone will have some nail scissors.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’

This howl of despair as he sank down in the armchair instantly turned into one of agony, the appendage having pulled at his testicles as it caught on the edge of the chair cushion.

‘I’ll go downstairs and see if they’ve got some nail scissors.’

DT didn’t say anything, he just looked at me as if to say, ‘Why did I ever listen to you?’

I went off to knock on the downstairs neighbour’s door. She was a trainee solicitor who lived by herself and I was never sure, with her neat and anal look, that she wasn’t the phantom pube collector.

‘Hello, I was just wondering if I could borrow a pair of nail scissors?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’ Great; with a small pair of scissors I should be able to get inside the cast and snip off the pubes. ‘Here you are.’ She produced a pair of clippers neatly placed on a folded paper handkerchief, a detail that was enough to convince me that she had to be the ‘phantom’.

‘Oh . . . no, actually I needed scissors, not clippers, sorry . . ..’

‘Oh, well, I’ve got scissors but . . . what’s it for?’

‘Oh, don’t worry . . . Well, it’s for trimming my boyfriend’s beard.’ She disappeared again and came back seconds later with a pair of long pointed hair scissors in a see-through plastic sheath. Oh well, slimmer than the kitchen scissors and better than nothing.

‘These are my best hair scissors and they can be used only for hair; anything else will blunt them.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, it will definitely just be the hair. Well, that’s what I’m hoping, anyway!’ She looked concerned. ‘No, no, no, I’m only joking, I’ll take great care of them. Thanks very much.’

When I re-entered the flat, brandishing what could be the answer to our prayers, DT’s hands, which had been holding his head, shot down to his groin.

‘You’ve got to be joking!’

‘Well, let’s just . . . give it a go.’

‘Oh God.’

It was fine; I managed to slip the scissors down between cast and scrotum, and snip the first pubes free, after which it was plain sailing. It was a perfect cast, coming away completely intact, except that the inside now sprouted several ginger pubic hairs, which simply wouldn’t detach.

‘I suppose it’s like having your name inside.’

‘Yes.’

DT wasn’t laughing, but I think he was pretty chuffed with it, as it took pride of place on the mantelpiece for some months, prompting admiring glances from female visitors as well as several male ones, come to think of it. When I went to place the scissors back in their sheath, I noticed one or two of his pubes were still attached to the blades. I removed them, but couldn’t resist leaving one. I then waited to see whether it would reappear under the door in a little envelope, but of course it never did.

In the summer holidays after my first year at college, I was working as a ward orderly at the General Hospital in Birmingham. I loved the job and had far greater success in it than I ever had in my original nursing role. This was largely because less was expected of me as an orderly and my nursing experience bumped me up above the others in terms of competence. So I shone, also because my confidence had been hugely boosted by my year at the polytechnic. My mother thought that I was staying in the nurses’ home at the General, whereas I was in fact renting a room with DT in Varna Road, a notorious street in the Birmingham red-light district called Bordsley Green.