The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (51 page)

At home with his mother and stepfather and the children, it was a different world. In that house, in spite of the overcrowding, everything was orderly, neat, bright. It seemed always as if truth were spoken and words transparent in their honesty. Anyone who derided family life, called it, for instance, a cover-up of ugly secrets, skeletons in cupboards, should have to come to see their family. More than anything in the world, he would have liked to make such a family for himself. One day. To have that sanctuary, that peace, the absolute safety.

All that was strong and powerful and big about his mother was her physical size. Her spirit—once, he would have said her soul—was gentle and tender, timid and innocent. He was as nearly sure as he could be that she had never heard of men loving men, that if told, she would barely believe it. Experts—so-called experts, doctors, psychologists—were saying that it was strong, dominant women who made their sons into homosexuals. They ought to see his mother, humble, quiet, compassionate, deferring to the male viewpoint, yet she had two sons who were queers.

He was sure Desmond was. Just as he knew his eldest brother was not and his youngest brother was not. The youngest was only fourteen, but still he could tell. He would have been able to tell if he were only eight or only six. Did it matter? Not if it could be hidden and the hiding be maintained, if not forever, for years. So that his mother need never know and Joseph need never know. In the climate in which they all lived, keeping it secret was obligatory, anyway. He was beginning to find out that it would be preferable for him to have syphilis or be certified as mad than to admit his homosexuality.

3

The consultant in contagious diseases he went to interview at the local hospital called himself a liberal. He told John he was opposed to anything that might curb prostitution because that would turn more men toward homosexuality. John asked him if he thought of homosexuality as an illness and, if so, whether it was one of the diseases he was a specialist in.

“Venereal disease is my subject,” the man said none too pleasantly. “But, yes, I do think of inverts as sick men. You notice I call them ‘inverts' and not ‘perverts.' In my opinion, they are to be pitied, not condemned. Our task is to cure them, not send them to prison.”

“How will you do that?”

John really wanted to know. If there was a possibility, he wanted it. In a curious way, from observing him, watching him, he thought Desmond wouldn't want it. But he did. He wanted to feel for Sheila or some other girl, any girl, the desire he had had for the man in the forest.

“How will I do it? I shan't. I'm a physician. We must pin our faith on the psychiatrists. Aversion therapy is the up-and-coming thing.”

The psychiatrist John talked to was convinced a failure of family background was responsible. Many homosexuals were fatherless or their mothers didn't know how to be mothers. As a result, boys grew up as feminine souls in male bodies. John thought of his own family, of the mother he thought of as perfect, the woman who had remarried solely, he was sure, to give her children a father.

He wondered what the psychiatrist would say if he told him the truth, if he could possibly imagine telling anyone the truth. But he knew the answer. He would be told it only looked that way to him, that his mother wasn't really passive and gentle, Joseph wasn't really strong and dominant, and the family members weren't really happy, but suppressing their true feelings. That was the way psychiatrists always talked. They had an answer for everything.

Next day, he went back to the coffee bar. The “screamers” weren't there, but other queers were. He could tell. He should have felt at home among them, but he didn't. A woman was staring at the two at a corner table, at their longish hair, their tight trousers and too-sleek sports jackets. John thought, If one were a dwarf and put to live on an island where there were only dwarfs, would one feel better about things or worse? He didn't know. But he knew a solution to all this was possible. If you could live and be yourself and do what you wanted and everyone else accept and even like you and be pleased. Of course it was ridiculous, impossible; it would never happen.

Abnormal, sick, mad, filthy, wicked, resistant to a caring society's desire to cure you, that's what you were and would always be. Why wasn't Desmond weeping and distraught for the blow fate had dealt him? Why was he
happy?

John ordered a coffee and a cheese roll. Seeing those others affected him in a way far from the editor's intention when he had set him on this assignment. It made him want to go back to the spoiled forest. Of course he couldn't go back there, because police patrolled it. But there were other places, the London parks, Victoria Park, for instance, the nearest one to where he lived. There were public conveniences. He hated the thought of that because it put what he wanted to do on a par with peeing and shitting. Love shouldn't have his mansion in the place of excrement, as someone ought to have written but hadn't.

Almost without knowing it, at least without thinking about it first, he moved his seat to the empty table next to the one where the longhaired men sat. They would think he had only moved to be nearer the window. He ordered another coffee. He was afraid to be seen looking at the men and he only gave them a covert glance, but it was long enough to see that one of them had plucked his eyebrows. Sheila had started doing that, but you could hardly imagine a man … John began to feel excited.

He was very near them. He could hear everything they said. One of them was a hairdresser; the other worked in a men's outfitters. They talked about customers and clients and not in the way heterosexuals would have. A sentence made him shiver.

“All those beautiful butch men in there naked.”

He hadn't heard everything they said, evidently. He'd missed what led up to that. They couldn't have meant the hairdresser's or the clothes shop, that was for certain. Then, rapidly, after more overheard words, he knew.

“Take care. They wouldn't let people with permed hair within miles.”

“I'll have to grow my eyebrows.”

“Oh, do. And we'll go, shall we?”

John didn't stay any longer. He had a curious feeling that he needed air. It had been quite fresh in there, smelling sweetly of coffee and pastries, but he had felt as if he were being choked. He stood outside, taking deep breaths. It was a long time, all of half an hour, before he allowed himself to think coolly of what they had said, the place they had named, the venue they were going to. Where he could go. If they could, why not he, too?

It was the perfect place. Anonymous, they had said. You could be invisible, or almost invisible. And the beauty of it was you could go therefor a … 
well, legitimate purpose. Many did. Perhaps most did. Not a park or an open space where the police walked, not a sordid place of excrement. The reverse of that really.

A place of absolute cleanness. Of purity. Nothing you did there could be dirty or squalid because, by definition, all dirt was washed away in those surroundings. There, in that whiteness, you would be whiter than the snow.

4

The piece he wrote for the paper was too sympathetic, the editor said. It turned homosexuals into misunderstood men or even sick men, putting them on a par with sufferers from a congenital disease. That frightened John. He thought the editor seemed suspicious of him and, rewriting his article, he put in a lot of statistics of the number of men convicted of “grave and degrading” homosexual offenses.

Still, the editor wasn't satisfied. “You don't seem to understand what the filthy buggers do. Do you know, I heard of one of them who put tomato ketchup on his privates to look like a woman with her monthlies.”

“You're not asking me to put that in, are you? Aren't we supposed to be a family newspaper?”

“I'm not asking you to put it in, Mr. Ryan, I'm just giving you an idea. You write about them as if they've got TB, poor sods.”

But that was enough for John. He was more disgusted with himself than with the editor. He was betraying himself and his kind, his nation, and he'd heard the cock crowing once too often. He said he'd done his best, could do no more, and someone else must be found to write it. By then, he didn't much care, even if he was putting his job on the line. He had a job move in view. In fact, he had two possible jobs in his sights.

That same day, from his office, which was no more than a partitioned-off area of the printing-press room, with a phone in it and a typewriter, he put a phone call through to the Mile End Public Baths. The door was shut. Not that it mattered. If anyone overheard, they would only suppose he was pursuing his research for the wretched feature they all still thought he was writing.

A cockney voice answered. He knew they had men's days and women's
days and he asked which days were for men only. Tuesday, Thursday Friday, and Saturday. Did he need to bring towels? No, and no soap or shampoo, either.

Tomorrow was Tuesday, but that was too soon. Besides, he had a council meeting to cover. Someone with good shorthand was needed for that, and John was proud of his. Thursday? He wouldn't go in on Thursday but would use the evening to watch. Find the place and check out its environs, see what was in the wind.

On Wednesday evening, he did what he always did when he wasn't working, went home. Had his evening meal at home. The concept of the high tea was going, he sometimes thought, being replaced by a cup of tea and biscuit in the afternoon and something you either called dinner, if you had pretensions, or supper, if you were what George Orwell had called upper lower middle class. John had written a leading article about changes in mealtime and meal customs for the paper. It had provoked plenty of readers' letters. But at home, they still had high tea, and he loved it. Those meals were by far the best of his week. Tinned fruit to start with and evaporated milk, ham and tongue (chicken for a great treat) and hard-boiled eggs and lettuce and tomatoes, thin-cut brown bread and butter, then ginger cake or a Dundee cake, maybe Bakewell tarts, biscuits, and a chocolate bar for everyone.

His mother was the best cook in the world. He liked to tell her that and see her pleasure. She had had a hard life. But her big family of loving children was her reward. There must be plenty of women, he thought, who would like to have a lot of children if only they could have them already big and sensible and independent. She had brought hers up the hard way, six children, never much money, and, after his father died, perhaps not much love. Well, not much of that sort of love. You only had to look at Joseph to know that.

Joseph was at home; he always was. John couldn't remember a single evening when Joseph had taken his mother out anywhere. They stayed at home with the children, who weren't Joseph's but might as well have been. He treated them as his own. Stephen, Mary, Margaret, Desmond, James, and himself. Aged fourteen, nearly sixteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, and the one who had been away and seen the world and come back, oh, so thankfully.

Joseph said grace. He was a devout Catholic but behaved more like a
nonconformist, reciting “For what we are about to receive” and reading the Bible every evening. Desmond wasn't there. At work, his mother said. Desmond worked in a London hotel, doing what, John didn't know, perhaps as a porter. He was always vague about what he did. John missed him; he liked everyone to be there.

James's wife of a month sat between him and Mary. Her pregnancy had begun to show. John thought he longed for the coming baby almost more than its parents did, perhaps really more, for James and Jackie had had to get married and very likely wouldn't have if she hadn't been pregnant. But he knew his mother rejoiced in the prospect of her first grandchild and Joseph did, too, after his first anger was over.

It had been left to John to explain things to Stephen. He was going to use this evening to do that, take him aside after tea and have a quiet, reassuring word. Joseph had made Stephen feel the disgrace of it. He had spoken with his customary measured gentleness, but the words he used were harsh. James and Jackie had committed a sin and now must make restitution, must marry, never mind their feelings—those had nothing to do with it. They had to marry and come to live with James's mother and stepfather, inconvenient though it might be, crowded though it would certainly be, for they had nowhere else to go. Sin, Stephen was told, must always be paid for, and the payment was unpleasant and painful.

John, of course, took a different line. They went up to the bedroom Stephen shared with Desmond, ostensibly for John to look at Stephen's cigarette-card collection. There, first of all, he told Stephen to remember he owed Joseph a lot; he must always love and respect Joseph. But he need not take everything he said too seriously. This wasn't the big tragedy Joseph said it was and it certainly wasn't some exceptional crime that every right-thinking person condemned.

“Uncle Joseph called it a sin,” Stephen said.

“I know. But, believe me, this is something that happens all the time. Some of the strongest feelings we have when we're young are our sexual feelings and they are the hardest to resist. I think Uncle Joseph has forgotten that. James and Jackie couldn't resist their sexual feelings and the result is that they're going to have a baby. That doesn't sound like a crime, does it?”

Stephen asked thoughtfully, “What would be a sin, then?”

“To harm someone or to betray him, to tell lies, to be unkind. The most important in all this is the baby who's going to be born and that he or she has a family and plenty of people to be loved by. We've had that, haven't we, all of us?”