Untold Stories (21 page)

But as the newly arrived young man descends the staircase before spending the afternoon on the sands with his mother, to whom I remember I was particularly foul that day, I feel for him only pity.

‘If only I'd known.'

‘Known what?'

‘Oh, just known.'

Having made manhood as it seems to me just in time, when in August 1952 I go off to the York and Lancaster Regimental Depot at Pontefract Barracks to begin my National Service I am still far from adult. A puny boy, I have turned into a lanky young man, looking, in my khaki and beret, not unlike those underfed youths in outsize Wehrmacht uniforms, paraded before the Movietone cameras early in 1945 to demonstrate how far Nazi fortunes had sunk that the Fatherland must needs be defended by such children. Now it is my turn.

It is some time in 1950, while passing the First Church of Christian Science at the top of Headingley Lane, that I come to the conclusion that, all things considered, I am homosexual. The church has since moved to more modest premises and the imposing Portland stone temple that was witness to this boyish assessment is now an adjunct of Leeds Girls' High
School. It would have been evening and the chances are I was out for a walk. ‘Going out for a walk, are you, love? Don't go anywhere lonely.' Mam is making a lampshade and Dad is playing along to the wireless on his violin. Television has not long been started; I have never even seen it and we still cling to the wireless, hoping it won't catch on.

Evenings are generally like this. I go out for a walk and visit the library on North Lane. Mam and Dad go to bed about nine, and when I come back I take them a cup of tea. My lonely patrols take me all over the still gaslit streets of Headingley, Woodhouse and Meanwood, the world to me at fifteen suddenly a place of inexpressible wonder. I marvel at the wind streaming through the beech trees on the edge of Beckett Park, the colours of the rain-washed flags, and the lights of Leeds laid out below Woodhouse Ridge. That is the way I will have gone on this particular evening. Down Wood Lane and along the path up to the Ridge, then cutting through one of the ginnels into North Hill Road or Cumberland Road, lined with the great mansions of nineteenth-century wool merchants, now hostels for the university or flats for lecturers. This brings me back into Headingley Lane, as off it run the Richmonds, and somewhere in Richmond Avenue is the reason I've taken to roaming these suburban streets on summer evenings: a boy, a couple of forms below me at school, with whom I am hopelessly infatuated, and to whom at this time I have scarcely spoken, and seldom do much, and he certainly never knows the part he plays in my life.

‘There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight, /To me did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light.' We had done Wordsworth for School Certificate, and at fifteen this seems to me not so much poetry as a statement of fact. Patrolling the streets on these ‘rain-ceased evenings' it is just what I feel, though the cause of the world's transformation is plainer to me than it was to Wordsworth. It is love, as I have no hesitation in dubbing this feeling that sends me walking the streets; not to meet the loved one particularly, which I never actually do, still less anybody else (which I didn't know you did). It is just to look wide-eyed at the world.

Still, if love can transfigure Leeds, it isn't, it seems to me, just an adolescent phase. No. There is no doubt about it, and I cross the road to the white Portland stone temple, I am homosexual.

Enlisting in the ranks of deviancy, though, has nothing to do with sex. How can it, since I've never had any sex? It is as if someone who has never been to a football match now decides which team he will support. With me it is all looking, not doing, though the looking, I know, is always at my own sex. It is a fate, too, a destiny, and one, it seems to me, that rules out any possibility of happiness, which I think of not as a mood that comes and goes, but as a goal, a place one arrives at … or in my case, not.

The problem, it seems to me then, is less an emotional than a mathematical one. If, as the papers sometimes say (and they say very little at this time), one in ten men are homosexual; this means that the odds against one meeting, falling for Mr Right, are ten times greater than if it's Miss Right one is looking for. And the chances of Mr Right falling for me in return make the odds against it astronomical. I see it all in terms of love and romantic passion, the thought of sex with the loved one scarcely figuring – and the thought of sex with anyone but the loved one not figuring at all. Had it done so, I might have come to my senses – and that phrase exactly describes it – much sooner. Where sex is concerned, what I find hard to believe is that two people, boy and girl, or boy and boy (girl and girl never occurs to me), can ever be of one mind. That one might desire the other, that I understand since it's my permanent state of mind, from fifteen onwards. But that that feeling might be returned, let alone acted upon, is beyond my comprehension. The same sex, the other sex … whatever alterations are made to the parts, the equation seems to me impossible. How can the desire of one person intersect with the desire of another? And produce the line, however long, they will never intersect; human beings are parallels, never meeting, distinct, separate, each one moated and fortified, on and on to infinity. It's this sense of impossibility that gives me, as knowing and lascivious as any other boy of that age, a seeming innocence. Because I do not believe sex can happen, I seldom notice when it does, and some of this incredulity has stayed with me all my life.

Fervently Christian though I am, it never occurs to me to think that my feelings are wrong, still less perverse, even though I am not at this time the least bit open-minded but illiberal and censorious rather. But how can a state of mind or heart that so transforms the world and vivifies it and makes each day count, painful though it is while filling me with melancholy and longing, how can this be other than good? And though there is no one in whom I can easily confide, I know instinctively that these unrequited affections, a succession of which will see me through my teens and, on and off, twenty years or so after, are the only education worth having. It isn't an education which I would have elected to undergo, but nor do I wish it away, then or now.

Still, the most bigoted clergyman would have been gratified by the degree to which I translate these longings into action, i.e. not at all. The objects of my affection are never aware of the place they hold in my heart, or that I am so primed with the details of their existence that I can at any moment of the day pinpoint their whereabouts. But so remote am I, and so aloof, they may not even think of me as a friend. None long to know me as I long to know them; all are normal, as I think of it; none, as I also think of it, are queer.

Though I know in my heart I am not mistaken, I still cling to the hope that these feelings (the feelings I have had for as long as I can remember) are ‘just a phase', that this is a stage everybody goes through, and since at fifteen I am still technically a boy, not yet having achieved puberty, I kid myself there is still time.

What could trip the switch that will divert me from one sex to the other, I do not speculate. I try and pretend to myself there are girls I find attractive, but there aren't, and none find me attractive; but since our school is not co-educational, there's not much chance to find out.

The incentive, though, is always to be ‘normal', or at least (as in so many other departments) like everyone else. Still, there is a part of me that takes pride in the fact that, for all its miseries, not being normal is to have been singled out, though for what, except continuing frustration and unhappiness, I find it hard to say.

I study as if they are code books the works of writers I have been told are homosexual, though of course they cannot at this time openly admit it. There is Stephen Spender, whose autobiography
World Within World
is on this score thought rather daring, though I am puzzled that he has subsequently got married. How could this be, homosexuality, as I see it, some sort of Devil's Island from which there is no escape? There is Auden, about whom I am not sure, though a careful study of the pronouns in the love poems seems to indicate that his affections might just go either way. There is Denton Welch, who is a little over-sensitive for my taste, and who, like me, seems only to gaze. Most satisfactorily, though, there is A. E. Housman, whose affections are unspoken (or spoken of as unspoken), which is what mine always are, and who regards love as a doomed enterprise, right from the start. Of his life and the object of his affections I know nothing, but as I roam the streets of Headingley in 1950 I feel he is the one I might tell it to, though what this ‘it' was I would have been hard put to say.

As it is, I share my shameful secret with no one, though I have a friend at church, Robert Butterfield, who is older than I am, and who seems to take it for granted without being told, just as I know without being told that he is the same way. Did I not know, it would be hard to deduce from his demeanour, camp (at any rate in Leeds) not yet having been invented. Robert is so far from camp he's actually dangerous, prone to sudden rages and denunciations, scathing pronouncements on friends' characters that seem to me far too outspoken. Robert keeps a notebook and has unchanging, adult handwriting which I envy, mine large, obviously immature and changing from one day to the next. He has already done some of his National Service in the RAF, but has apparently been invalided out. He retains, though, a fondness for boots and heavy shoes which he keeps highly bulled. Religious, fond of music, and well read, he seems to have no job and lives at home, his brother and sister part of the same group of friends I belong to at St Michael's Church.

Far and away the most sophisticated and knowing member of our group, he is worldly, mocking and above all grown up. He has come to
some conclusions about his character, decided what he is and where he is going. I like to think I am like that too, but only need to compare our handwriting to know this is not the case. Still, he seems to know what I am like and when he sums up my character, not always favourably, I am nevertheless flattered. A mystery to myself, sloppy and longing for definition, it pleases me that someone should have some notion of what I am like, because I don't.

We are both queer, that at least I do know, though I make him impatient because I am less resigned to it than he is, holding hands with the occasional girl (the furthest it ever gets), an effort at conformity he does not see the point of and which triggers off one of his rages.

Periodically he disappears, and it's only later I find these unexplained absences are time spent in a local mental hospital. It's not on this account, though, that we drift apart. I go into the army, and then am away at Oxford, so I see him very little. I am shocked, but somehow unsurprised, when in 1966 I hear that he has committed suicide.

It's Robert who gets me to read Denton Welch's journals, Stephen Spender's
World Within World
and the early novels of Mary Renault, books which, if you spotted them on someone's shelves, told you all you needed to know about their sexual proclivities. And told the police, too, though that might seem fanciful. But this is the 1950s, the period of the Montagu case and the suicide of the pianist Mewton-Wood, both casualties of the campaign against homosexuality conducted by the vicious and bigoted Home Secretary at the time, David Maxwell Fyfe. It's hardly surprising if to someone as timid as I am the very act of falling in love seemed to put you on the wrong side of the law.

The sight of such tell-tale books in someone's house ought then to signify safe ground: here at least there is no need for discretion. Perversely, never having chosen to be part of the homosexual club in the first place, I just wince at the implied complicity, and am bashful and ill at ease.

It's the same later on in life, where I find myself occasionally invited to all-male parties and where I resent the assumptions about my character and inclinations such an invitation implies, and find the uninhibited talk
both tedious and embarrassing. This duly marks me out as stuffy and closeted, which may well be true (and was certainly true then), but since homosexuality is a differentness I've never been prepared wholly to accept in myself, why, I think, should it be so readily taken for granted by others, and I want nothing of their covert camaraderie.