WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS

by

David Evans

A Second Volume of Memoir

Originally published as

A SEASON OF OUTRAGE
This edition is still available in paperback form

Begun in December 2004

Bearing in mind that …
If you should make a man your friend
You should stand by him ‘til the end;
But there are many different sorts of friends
And life has infinite supplies of ends …
Copyright © David Evans 2008, 2015 All rights reserved
12 Ripplevale Grove London N1 1HU
0207 607 0071

Published by Tusitala Press 2015

12 Ripplevale Grove London N1 1HU

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be re-produced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by
any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.

BRITISH library Cataloguing in Publication Data –

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
Tusitala
A SEASON OF OUTRAGE

ISBN 978-0-9558951-7-3
eBook ISBN 978-1-7830182-4-6

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd. Eastbourne

All type and graphic layouts created and produced by Melinda Sandell

Please call 0207 607 0071 for all enquiries concerning this publication.

The authors moral rights are hereby asserted.

Photographs by Wendy Allison, Alastair Cox, Nigel Quiney, Bryan Forbes, Judi Maynard and David Evans
 Contents

INTRODUCTION

Part I The Tree of Knowing

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen

PART II Home Thoughts

INTRODUCTION
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
 Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two

INDEX OF NAMES
BOOKS AVAILABLE BY DAVID EVANS, NIGEL QUINEY FROM THE TUSITALA
PRESS
London, Christmas 2004

Despite my best endeavours, it now appears to me that my life has become both my best work as
well as my testament to myself. If you can bear to, please, read on …

Some of the text in this book is presented in the font known as Courier New, size 12. The font
is intended to indicate passages taken from my journals and from both my own and others’
original writing. The journal passages are mostly verbatim although I have taken a journalist’s
licence and edited some although only for the sake of clarity.

I was going to abandon dedications but I have to declare deep gratitude for the friendship of
Bryan and Nanette Forbes, without whom I realise that my life would have been poorer. It should
not have to be said but without Nigel, there would have been nowhere for my story to go. Yet,
with him, this woeful tale turned out not to be so hopeless after all. Thanks, Da.
October 2015

When we were children, we went to parties. There were two basic games at the parties I used
to attend. One was ‘Pass the Parcel’ and the other was ‘Musical Chairs’. Both involved music
being played, if not on a gramophone or record player then on a tinkly, out-of-tune piano played
by a whiskery old lady brought in for the purpose. She who played the music was supposed not
to see the state of the game and who was where.
As the music played, the parcel was passed from one excited child to another as though it
contained a bomb. No one wanted to hold it for a second longer than necessary. He or she who
was left with the parcel when the music stopped forfeited a place in the game. It was only the last
child holding the parcel who would be hailed the winner. There was, by definition, only one
winner in those days.
In the game of chairs, the music signalled us to make another round of the central bloc of
wooden chairs, cautious and aware of where we might find a seat because the child who could
not find a seat when the music stopped had to leave the game. When the music began again, a
chair would be removed from the supply. The game was not meant to be easy. Most had to lose.
And so on and on the music would play until the last to hold the parcel got to unwrap it and
find something of a reward beneath the wrapping and the last of two children left in the game of
chairs was also awarded a prize. To the victor, the spoils!
I passed from childhood to then emerge scintillating from my highflying teenage chrysalis
eager to surf like a prince of the impossible wave through my twenties in a rainbow haze of
brilliant achievement, finally struggling triumphant out of the tide of years into my thirties …
And that’s when the music stopped.
 THE POWER OF THE WRITTEN WORD
The written word enables me
To be the man I dreamed I’d be;
I like this person, flying free
And crave his easy company
I merely let his thread unwind
Then glory in his wandering mind.

His words, like birds, defy restraint

And fabulous chimeras paint.
The words he writes make so much sense
On them he glides with eloquence
His speech has no impediments
Old doubts hold little consequence
That schoolboy with his frightened stammer
Is re-forged by a kinder hammer
The new man’s milder in his manner
But still stands tall beneath his banner.

From me to him and thence to you

Some magic sees the process through.
The letting go’s hardest to do,
But done, there’s nothing left to rue

There are no traces of the ghost

To whom the former me played host,
The baggage that I’ve dragged around
Has dropped weightlessly to the ground
So confident in writer’s guise
I need no truck with masks and lies,
And in my work I dance and sing
Quite unafraid of anything.

I pay heed to what’s gone before

But then is less and now is more’
Tomorrows are fair spoils of war
And hindsight’s battle’s cheapest whore …
Do not be borrower nor lender.
Old debts need never be remembered

If you are happy to surrender

Loose the chains of role and gender
Throw off all ‘straints of family
And those chance throws of pedigree
And be the soul you need to be
To entertain eternity …
 INTRODUCTION

“So many little incidents, each of such little consequence.”

In the summer of 2004, whilst my partner, Nigel Quiney, and I were in Provence for what I
hope becomes our annual stay at La Maurette, my friend and hostess, Jackie Jesse, observed in a
young man whom we passed on the street as we were driving to the beach one day, that ‘he had
the devil’s beauty …’ It was an expression, she assured me, which was not her own but one
which her father had used frequently when describing the attractiveness of the young of either
sex. The idea of ‘a devil’s beauty’, a passport to sexual and, in all probability, life success, a
beauty which could hold all in its clutches, helpless in its sway, powerless in its thrall remained
with me all day. Viscerally, I knew exactly what she meant.
I had just published my first volume of memoirs, APPOINTMENTS WITH THE DREAM
FAIRY and was thus thinking disproportionately of my own youth as I vainly read and reread
various passages of my first volume of reminiscence, finally in ‘proper’ book form. Even in the
age of my own youth, I had a certain idea that I was not possessed of this devil’s beauty and I
suspect that I was more than aware that my looks were merely averagely OK. I must have
therefore intuited that I was never going to acquire my future as of right but that I was going to
have to fight for every inch of the territory of ‘I’.
However, to fight one has to have an enemy and in writing this present volume, I have
discovered that in the many battles in this ongoing war, the enemy was none other than myself. I
realised at the end of APPOINTMENTS that I was a relatively happy bunny. Now, almost at the
end of this second volume, I realise that that happy little bunny has long been trapped, skinned,
cooked and devoured by the events and circumstances which followed my exit from the music
business.
In a television programme recently, I saw a poster, one of many plastered all over Glasgow,
on which the legend read: “I don’t believe the truth”. It was a sentiment I identified with
immediately. However much we, as children, were told how good we were, that there was
nothing to worry about, that everything would be alright, we often didn’t believe what we were
being told. There were always those little voices, those nagging doubts.
I’d always known about this struggle for and maintenance of identity because I remember
being keenly aware, from the time I was first aware of those possessed of this ‘devil’s beauty, of
who the ‘drop-deads’ were, those gorgeous ones who would never have a problem in the looks
department, in the popularity stakes or in the sex arena. I remember because I knew that I had to
somehow ally myself, e’en the callow teenager I was, with these living gods and goddesses in
order that I would also be noticed, basking in the shadows of their glory. It’s not a pretty
admission, I know.
And I realised something else. Before I ‘came out’, all those many years ago, because of the
constraints forced upon my behaviour and relationships by my sexuality, I had contradictory
sources of self-esteem. I was as nothing to myself, dissembler that I had to be, and yet was
everything to the world who saw me as successful, even glamorous. Come-out, ex-closet, I was
suddenly, uncomfortably, everything to myself and yet nothing to that world which I perceived
could not deal with this other, this ‘new’ me. I had had no inkling that such could be the
consequence of ‘coming out’. Free to embrace a new world yet left as a pariah in the old. I
remember feeling this altered state deeply and, questioning whether the move had been a right
one. Thus more doubts were born; more of those nagging self-doubts and thus was a new hurt
engendered, a new prick to kick against, a fresh slight to rail about.
I now think, for a fleeting moment, that maybe it would have been better to have lived out
my lie and let the world maintain what it thought was the truth? Many people did, do and will do
and had I followed their example, mightn’t I have had grandchildren now? Of course, I shall
never know but my question to myself made for an interesting conjecture, given that the vast
majority of the world’s homosexuals are indeed married, with children … I’ve since known lots
of people, parents and grandparents, who haven’t properly ‘come out’ or who live shadowed
half-lives, keeping ‘secret’ that part of them they fear might damage them. Quantitively, such
people don’t seem to be any more or less screwed up than I am. Qualititively, who knows?
I must have been a fairly convincing dissembler. My friend and alumnus, John Tagholm,
after reading APPOINTMENTS told me that he had no idea that I had so much else going on in
my life at the University of Kent and that, indeed, I had patently been living an entirely separate,
parallel life. I had been the sort of person who, a generation earlier and attending a more
esteemed university, could have been co-opted into the spying trade by some Whitehall
chicanery. Except, perhaps not. Even with cover blown, I would have been impossible to
blackmail as I never seriously considered concealment. There was nothing I felt ultimately worth
hiding. From anyone. On the other hand, in the ‘old world’, there were still those to whom I
would not proactively reveal my ‘secret’.
To conclude the gay ‘coming-out’ issue and to try to illustrate how times may have changed
a lot but that people have changed little, I recount this recent incident. Even when a man declares
he is in no way prejudiced, that he has banished the attitude from his canon, the prejudice is still
very much alive and well. A once-close university friend called me in the late autumn of 2003
for no better reason than to tell me that his youngest son, a mere fifteen year old in Manchester,
had announced that he was gay. My friend confessed that he was rather worried. As the
telephone conversation progressed, I wondered whether he was as equally concerned about the
boy’s twin sister. I felt not for the father, an utterly liberal, progressive, highly creative and
woundingly ambitious man because I realised that my former friend and flatmate had obviously
paid no substantial attention to my own nerve-racked, stammered forth ‘coming-out’ to him all
those years ago in our tiny university apartment. I felt that he should have known by now how to
handle the current situation with his own beloved child.
Being gay was, obviously, in my friend’s eyes, something to be very worried about. Very
concerned about. Scared of. This, in my book, is the most common facet of a condition known as
homophobia. Homophobia is not merely hitting a queer over the head with an axe; it has another
face, more insidious and far less identifiable, a face wearing a mask of suspicion and mistrust
and fear. It can, even more dangerously, be disguised behind the mask of a smile and the screen
of friendly words, behaviour that can deceive us into thinking that we have been accepted, that
we are ‘safe’.
So, by heaven, I felt for that Manchester kid who was facing the remainder of his teenage,
maybe the remainder of his life, with a caring, sharing father who had to be seen as such, grace a
political correctness but who might never even begin to ‘understand’ whatever the straight world
thinks ought to be ‘understood’. That same doting papa would worry about the straight, twin
sister only ever because of her gender, not because of her sexuality. That night I prayed that the
boy, whom I had never met, was possessed of that elusive devil’s beauty. But, maybe everything
turned out fine for both kid and dad and sister, because I never heard from my friend again …
So, nature or nurture, folks? Maybe both? Lately I have been told that the twin sister also turned
out to be gay. Phew.
I am, dear reader, as you will now have gathered, nothing if not gay first. Even my rabid
Englishness I would have to ascribe to second place in the chart positions I accord my personal
characteristics.
But to return to the infinitely absorbing subject of the life that I made …

*******

Until last summer in the south of France, 2004, in Jackie and John Jesse’s garden at Le Muy,
looking west towards the magnificent mass of the mountain of Roquebrune through a delicate
tracery of the pine branches on the trees in Jackie’s own personal forest - little things like owning
a forest still impress me - I had completely forgotten that Billy McCarty and I used to fuck.
I was startled into remembering Billy as I read John Richardson’s book about the art
collector Douglas Cooper and his fabulous Cubist and post-Impressionist collection of paintings
and artworks which upon his death was bequeathed to … yes, Billy. Now, I have to tell you that I
was not the only person Billy McCarty used to entertain in his bedroom in Chapel Street off
Hyde Park Corner in those heady days of the early nineteen-seventies. Far from it … I also have
to admit that I had no idea this tall, gangly and yet consummately sexy American had anything to
do with the higher echelons of the world’s art establishment. Had there been anything hanging in
Billy’s apartment other than himself, I would have been too vague and naïve to twig. A Picasso
or a Leger on the hall wall? Heavens to Betsy! I was only just getting over Bernard Buffet’s grim
work and copycat daubs which their perpetrators hung on the railings of the Bayswater Road
Sunday market. And would I have cared had I known I was being indelicately rogered beneath
an acme of Cubism? Billy and the bed were much sexier than anything framed and on a wall.
Oscar Wilde was obviously right – Youth is wasted on the young. We mis-spent ours rather
profligately, certainly thoughtlessly although, had we thought at all, the notion of saving it would
have been an all-but unworthy. Billy mis-spent his youth in spades and died after a surfeit of
pleasure, his real legacy from Douglas, very prematurely.
And, after having exhumed Billy, metaphorically of course, on the way back to London on
the train from Montpellier, I suddenly thought of two other men I had known in my youth,
neither biblically but they were both fascinating and significant. Peter Doherty I fancy was
something to do with the Royal Opera House, a designer and Craig McDonald, merely
mentioned in APPOINTMENTS WITH THE DREAM FAIRY, who was the publicist at the new
National Theatre and who went off to Canada. Fascinating men with whom my friends and I
spent many wayward nights.
And it must have been on that same train that I remembered, too, that my father had once
grown mushrooms for a season in the basement of our house at Craithie, Blackmore Road in
Malvern. I was intrigued by the mushrooms. Maybe there was more to my father than I had
thought …
And there’s more. Recently, someone mentioned the Swiss Harry Laubscher who with
Michael Ho Chong managed the Sombrero Club in Kensington High Street, the club which
enjoyed the sobriquet YOURS OR MINE and which had provided us gay boys with a rare place
to be ourselves. And seeing Barbara Dixon on television lately, contributing to a programme
about Gracie Fields, I remembered that she and her manager/husband were frequent visitors to
John Reid’s office where Bernie Taupin’s roadie, the beautiful and bubble-haired Pete Hayes,
was their special friend. I remember having dinner with them all in an Edinburgh bistro when I
first arrived in that city and hoping that John Reid Enterprises could find some way of
representing Barbara internationally as she was and is a great talent as well as a tremendously
nice woman. No way was found, perhaps because no way was required. Kiki Dee, John Reid’s
in-house songstress, would not have been best pleased.
These prompted memories informed me that in compiling APPOINTMENTS, there had
been all this and so much more that I had left out, so much I had forgotten, so many names left
unchecked. I had rather wanted my personal posterity to record them all for they have all, willy-
nilly, become an integral part of this intriguing ‘me’.
But are the omissions so burningly important? Hardly, I suppose; probably not at all, but the
incompleteness of the medium of memoir struck home fundamentally and saddened me for I now
know that I shall never be able to do justice to all the names, in or out of any chronological order
or significance … There can never be, in my hindsight at least, any of that wonderful dynamic
about “I met him and then ‘x’ happened and because ‘y’ happened I met her and ‘z’ happened”.
Except that … There are always the exceptions.
So maybe, this volume of rambling remembering will take a slightly different tack and, as
well as concentrating upon the continuum of my own existence, also explore some of the peaks
and pinnacles and troughs and valleys of the personal and social scenery through which my life’s
road was to veer? I’ve concluded that the best memoir is that in which the subject describes his
own life in terms of the other lives in which he features, sometimes merely as a footnote,
sometimes as a chapter heading. We shall see. I shall certainly never revere my own version of
‘the truth’ in so gospel a fashion as I have done in the past and I eagerly await the musings of my
peers which might then set my own deviant perspective straighter.
However, the reluctance of many of said peers to even contemplate putting fingers to
keyboard amazes me. Some express aversion, some revulsion, some of the most academic even
plead incompetence. But maybe it’s these damn computers that are the problem? Oh for the
natural quill, the scratchy nib … Once upon a long-long time, aphorists, diarists and memoirists
would have put pen to paper. Now, this morning even, there was a debate on breakfast television
as to whether or not hand-writing was a necessary life skill? Oh, please …
My niece, Augusta Challis, would have wished that I had included more in
APPOINTMENTS about how and what I thought and felt about myself vis a vis the world. I
suppose she meant both my world and the other world, ‘their’ world. I can only reply that,
having pondered her observation for a minute or so, I didn’t think very much at all about the
hows and the whys. Then. I can only assume that either I was not of that disposition, then, or that
I was too busy living my life to think along such lines. On further pondering, however, I can
assure Augusta that upon leaving John Reid’s office in late 1976, the analysis of the whys and
hows began in earnest and have never stopped.
 I’m quite sure which mindset I prefer. I choose the former, non-thinking option without
hesitation. Too much thinking brings on a sort of mental indigestion, often regretful and usually
uncomfortable … Thought can be dangerously perverting and it also tends to blind one to what
other people, on whose lives yours impinges, might be thinking and feeling. There are those
whom I have known who have regarded too much thinking as selfish. Distasteful, even.
As well as many still living, this book of memoir will be sure to acknowledge and remember
many people who have died. I’m sure the following list will be too short before I can write ‘The
End’ but I wish to record the most recent crop and to confess that I really miss Margaret Gorman
who died in November 2003 and also Ben McKechnie Wilson not because I saw him so often
but because I owed him big time and I loved having him in my world. He was the one who
sacrificed time and went to a great deal of trouble to get me from an Amsterdam Hotel to Schipol
airport in late 1981 when I was down and out and all but flattened by the onset of a wicked bout
of hepatitis. I was so ill that without his kindness, I don’t know what would have happened to
me.
Carl Vandervoort also died in the summer of 2004, in America, our fabulador des chimeras,
a real tusitala. He was a terrible old buccaneer in many ways, one of the more excellent of the
world’s tellers-of-tales and spinners of yarns and his monstrous chimeras were much of the time
if not of his own manufacture, then due to his magnificent intellectual embroidery. But the
example of his life was meat and drink to me and I wish that I had known him better, longer.
And Sebastian Graham-Jones, too, my university alumnus who died about the same time.
His family were incredibly instrumental in getting my own buccaneering life off to a flying start
in the late sixties when we shared that cauldron flat, 80a Ashley Gardens in Thirlby Road,
London S.W.1.
Finally, 2004 stole Chris Hewitt, my childhood and teenage school friend who died in San
Francisco at the age of 57. He was born with the condition osteogensis imperfecta which
rendered him, fully grown, only three feet tall, with useless legs and subject to broken bones and
pneumonic chest conditions but which also left him with a mind and a talent for words which he
concomitantly honed and sharpened. He thwarted death by calling life’s bluff every day, as a
matter of course. We had only recently got back in touch. I am presuming that he wouldn’t mind
my reproducing one of his poems to kick off this second half of my own life-game …
 THE LIFTING TEAM

Recently in the hospital,

And in great pain
From broken bones
After an accident,
I had to be lifted:
Bed to gurney, gurney to
x-ray table (brutally hard) table to chair.

Each time they sent for the Lifting Team:

Solomon, built like a football player with
A wide smile, and Merwin, smaller, agile,
A savvy bird. Each time Solomon would say
(seeing the tenseness of fear on my face),
“Don’t worry, you’ll be alright.”
Indeed, their arms held me in a firm cocoon,
I never felt the slightest pain.

When in death’s last delirium,

I shall call on the lifting team.
They will arrive as angels at my bedside,
and Solomon will say,
“Don’t worry, you’ll be alright.”
And they will halt my ghastly nose-dive into
hell,
And lift me up, up, high up
into the fields of stars.

I so want to tell my truth about these and other wonderful friends and awful acquaintances
and fabulous and desperate encounters and experiences but, as Florence Courtice the barmaid
pronounced one night in the Oasis Club in Bristol in 1977 with all the gravel-voiced gravitas of
every opening-hours oracle, “’Tis only a drunken man who speaks his sober mind.”
So, here goes but who knows? Maybe I too will be permitted to find, in vino, veritas… I do
hope so. Cheers, Flo.
Dais, Still Touting
 Part I

The Tree of Knowing

Come and share some time with me

Beneath this tree of knowing
And watch the world a day or two,
The coming and the going
Perhaps, refreshed by sitting down
And sheltered by the spreading boughs
Between us we may learn some more
About the wheres and whys and hows
 Chapter One

My trouble finding Mister Right

Is that I find him every night …
By dawn of course, he’s Mister Wrong;
They’re never right for very long

For those of you who are not familiar with my life as set down in my first memoir,
APPOINTMENTS WITH THE DREAM FAIRY, that volume dealt with my life until the time I
left the employment of John Reid Enterprises in 1976. The latter organisation handled the careers
of fabled musicians and performers such as Elton John, Freddie Mercury and Queen, Kiki Dee
and Kevin Ayers. Previously, from 1970 ‘til 1975, I had cut my teeth working for another
management company whose main preserve was the career of the singer/songwriter Cat Stevens
as well as the thespian endeavours of such stars as Angela Lansbury, the late Peter Finch,
playwright John Osborne and directors such as Mike Hodges, he of GET CARTER fame.
I had had a simple country upbringing in Malvern, Worcestershire, brought up in a middle
class family of builders with a respectably long-established business as fundament. I had
managed to escape the fate of being ‘the only gay in the village’ at age eighteen and attended
university in Canterbury, Kent from which, after graduating, I had ended up after a variety of
lurching start-stops in ‘show business’.
In 1976, my principal, John Reid, had decreed that we enterprise the opening of an
Edinburgh auditorium known as The Playhouse, one which had been built as a variety house in
the early 1920s but which had only ever been used as a cinema. The idea was to host and present
a season of popular music concerts to coincide with the world-renowned summer Edinburgh
Festival. Me? I was the Devil’s Disciple. The Chosen One. As a director of John Reid
Productions and General Manager of the artistes’ company, the short straw was pulled by me.
So, I left London and my nice comfy life in South Audley Street in Mayfair and my nice
comfy flat in Putney where, cavorting ‘til God knows what hours, were my flatmate David
Minns and his lover, the soon-to-be legendary Freddie Mercury fresh from the world-wide
success of BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY. No sooner had I arrived in Edinburgh than I had met one
Ed Murray, an antique dealer of the town. We had seemed to hit it off and, approaching thirty
and in the shadow of my two best friends having found true love and with me on a side line, I too
had decided to try a stab at the ‘relationship thing’ and leave the music business altogether. By
the end of September, all the necessary resignations having been concluded, the arms of winter
in Scotland beckoned, shiveringly.
 33 Werter Road Putney, Where It All Began
Being in Edinburgh in autumn 1976 after the festival had ended was a little like being left
behind after the circus has left town. The worst of the entrepreneurial elephant dung had been
cleared away, the redundant posters had yellowed and were peeling on the town’s gash walls and
all that remained of the excitement enjoyed nightly beneath the big top was a patch of etiolated
grass on the cultural field which all-too-soon darkened to match the rest of the grass around it,
ultimately to be only hazily remembered, if at all. One of life’s more poignant palimpsests.
The Playhouse was to be the only survivor of all the elements of my final musical venture.
John Reid never pursued his political ambitions in Scotland, Sarah Forbes and he became
engaged but thankfully never married, Elton John found others to prop up his spiteful, Quixotic
relationship with ‘management’ and other windmills but the Playhouse lived on. It had a few
battles left to fight with the burghers and city authorities, some of whom wanted to plump for a
brand new venue to decorate their city’s artistic architectural vaults but the old variety house-
cum-cinema had won through. When I had first seen the place it had the appearance of an
unloved family mausoleum in an otherwise thriving cemetery. Last year, 2004, when my partner
and I drove by on top of the shuttle bus taking us from Leith, and the ship we were travelling on,
to Princes Street, the Playhouse building looked broodily and proudly pregnant, rather pleased
with itself as it sat beneath its crowning marquee on which was advertised the coming
attractions, an advertisement which also acknowledged the building’s continuing useful worth
thirty years later. Had I been left with an ounce of sentiment about the place, I might have been
seen to shed a tear.
Ed Murray’s household overlooking the Waters of Leith, which I did eventually join
permanently, was not the same as that in which I had temporarily stayed during the 1976
Playhouse summer. George Elas, Ed’s ex-partner, was around for at least three months,
alternatively moody and petulant or falsely bright and full of Polish swagger. As Ed’s previous
lover and business partner, I found his presence irksome and irritating. I felt awkward and
compromised, entirely devoid of any sensitivity, as I had no idea about how to run this
relationship ‘thing’ which I fancied I had wanted so much. I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was
going to do with my own life, let alone how that particular vacuum was going to fit into the
established life that Ed had led with George in that gloomy two-floored apartment in the stony-
faced countenance of the new town’s Moray Place. I remember little cheerfulness abroad on
those finely cobbled streets into which it seemed little sunshine penetrated. And there was to be
yet another spider on the web. As soon as August had thickened into September, Ed’s mother,
Mrs Murray, returned to Ed’s fold from her summer in Dundee, the Murrays’ home city.
Edmund, for he was no Edward, had not been born a Murray but a Beldowski. His father
was one of those in the Polish armed forces, many of whom settled in Scotland, on or just after
the outbreak of the second world war. The displaced Pole had met Jessie Swanson in Dundee.
She must have been a very pretty young woman, not wonderfully intelligent or even practical but
cute as warm bannock at a Sunday tea table. A bannock is a pancake. He would have been dark
and tall and thin, I imagine, like Ed, with a long face, aquiline features, pale-skinned, a perfect fit
for a fanciful young romantic who wanted to take care of a displaced refugee. Whatever,
Edmund was the result and I have a feeling - for in Scottish family circles these things are never
discussed - that his parents were not married. I have even forgotten whatever happened to the
Pole because at some point, whether he died or quit or what, Jessie was left on her own with a
young child. Certain godly and practical burgers of Dundee took her successively unto their
collective and then individual bosoms and found one Sidney Murray, an unmarried gentleman
whom she did not love and who was distant and undemonstrative but who was willing to support
her and give her child his name in return for certain housekeeping duties. Thanks. The Murrays
had once to do with The Dundee Courier, a local newspaper, and there was still, t’was said, some
money left …
But there were other compensations too and for Ed these took the shape and form of his
adoptive aunts, Belle and Aggie, both spinsters of Broughty Ferry who in their turn took him
against their own figurative bosoms and nurtured him. In fact they were tremendously proud of
him. For someone who knew the price of everything inanimate and the value of very little of any
human sort, Ed had learned early to invest his life’s accumulated capital not in undemonstrative
humans who seemed to have no function or value but in undemonstrative things, which did.
Though the former were here to stay, the latter could be swapped and exchanged and be turned to
profit. Ed’s collections started in a childish way, in line with many children’s hobbies, although
his fascination deepened until he began to develop specialist interests. At the point at which we
met, he was an acknowledged expert in ‘estate’ jewellery, clocks of all sorts and shapes and sizes
and continental furniture from every country on the European mainland. Armoires from France,
north and south, marquetry and inlaid furniture from the Netherlands and Belgium, chests from
Spain, commodes(chests of drawers to you folks) and chaises longues and Victorian rococo
vitrines and display cabinets. His customers came from all over Europe, indeed the world
although he was never precious and would buy anything, anywhere for anyone if he knew there
was a profit to be turned.
Obligingly, Belle and Aggie had both died within a short time of each other just as Ed’s
career as an antiques dealer took off and the not insubstantial estate which they collectively
bequeathed him was set immediately to the purpose of establishing him in Edinburgh. There he
bought his apartment, overlooking the riparian gardens of the stream known as The Waters of
Leith and set his shingle over a huge rented retail and storage premises in Dundas Street, later
including his lover George Elas into the scheme when it became clear that someone had to
remain in the shop to sell. To maintain the necessary supply of stock, Ed had to be out and about
on his buying rounds, routes which covered the length and breadth of Scotland and Northern
England. Raphael Antiques, as Ed nominated the business, became, for ‘the trade’, a force to
conjure with.
Ed’s customers … These were both of the rough and ready and the recherché variety. There
were swarthy Belgians who would arrive with a pantechnicon and driver in tow. There were
Australians who would arrive with shipping agents and clipboards and forms and sticky labels,
there were huffily grand queens from the chintziest and flounciest corners of the Kings Road and
Kensington Church Street, there were regular ‘privates’, there were browsers, time-wasters,
tourists, folk sheltering from the rain and the merely lonely who looked, cursorily, rarely bought
but left all the better for a chat. The itineraries and schedules of this customer base were, suffice
to say, entirely random.
To supply these customers, the buying sources for antiques of all descriptions which had
been so cornucopian at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties were pretty much drying up in 1976
when I first began to accompany Ed in the Volvo Estate, combing Midlothian’s and Fife’s
dealers and the antiques warehouses of Livingstone and Perth for goods. Only occasionally in
1976 were there those magnificent country house or castle sales which attracted dealers and
locals alike and where ‘going for a song’ was the theme tune. And songs there were, sung for
frequent bargains but the singer might never know the song.
This apparent conundrum is best explained by our once, early in our relationship, being at a
big Scottish country house sale one day. Whilst Ed was working the ‘ring’ thing, of which more
later, I wandered about and poked and prodded and lifted dusty old plates thrown into random
boxed selections. I put in a bid for one such box of china, a couple of pounds, no more. I liked
the look of a blue and white pattern ceramic piece with chipped handles which I fancied could be
used to plant hyacinths.
When the box was delivered to Ed’s shop and he had finished moaning about the rubbish I
was collecting, I emptied the contents and sorted through them, weeding out the real rubbish and
finding … Well, my blue and white piece turned out to be an eighteenth century Dutch Delft
jardinière which fetched a very decent profit indeed. However, the star of the box of junk was a
circular celadongreen ceramic bowl about three inches high and a foot in diameter standing on
three paw feet and which, having been dropped and smashed, had been pieced and glued together
in the dim and distant past.
I stood this bowl by itself on the office table, admiring the petrol-coloured shimmer of its
generous, subtle glaze and it spoke to me. I don’t know what it said but its language was
unmistakeable in that it was telling me that it was special. Indeed it was. The next time Ed and I
went to London, we took the bowl to Christie’s in King Street and its pedigree was verified.
Though its body was cracked to blazes and had been very poorly repaired, it was probably worth
very little. But it was special. Ming. Sixteenth century. I glowed and thrilled with pride. Where
that bowl is now, I know not but I, for one, miss it for I cared not about its cracks. That petrol
glaze was practically viscose.
I had a similar experience whilst rummaging through a box of broken and dismembered
costume jewellery one Saturday morning at Lyon and Turnbull’s sale. I pulled out a pendant,
formed in the shape of a galleon from whose enamelled keel hung a few discoloured and, what I
fancied, were mis-shapen pearls. It must have been discarded as being of nineteen-thirties origin,
galleons being a popular symbol in that period of design. Ed pooh-poohed it and rather scorned
me wasting my time on such footling junk. They were all wrong. My ship wasn’t a thirties
throw-away. It was made probably in continental Europe in the sixteenth century and even in its
declining state, fetched me a tidy sum. Pearls were never perfect in the post-Renaissance. Thus,
as they sang in Westside Story, “… so Officer Krupke, krup you!”
Much of Ed’s ‘grown-up’ buying was done both from knockers, people who ‘ran’ goods
they had bought around the established dealers, and from other dealers who had not, sometimes,
the contacts or, more likely, the knowledge of the realistic values that their stock commanded. It
was thus that we travelled and ferreted and roamed and I got to see a helluva lot of Scotland
although little converted me to its worship. I cannot help but associate rain and no lunch with
Scotland.
But let me take us back to Jessie Swanson. In many ways she was quite sophisticated. She
was certainly far more worldly than my own mother. Ed’s mother appeared un-phased at my
presence, although neither pleased nor displeased for Ed that he had met me. Perhaps she had
been conditioned by the arrivals and departures of ‘the others’, the Jimmys, the Robin Soanses.
She had certainly lived for the past few years with George. I addressed her, according to her
invitation, as Jan although I can remember George Elas still calling her Mrs Murray. She was
utterly un-domestically inclined and never knowingly offered to cook for us, so what she used to
do for Sidney, I can only imagine. Of what Jan ate, I have no memory although she was the
tidiest and cleanest person in the kitchen I have ever met. Ed’s kitchen had carpet on the floor,
does that say anything?
 Like his kitchen, Ed was very neat, clean and tidy in habits and behaviour. Likewise Jan.
When she dusted the apartment, she did so only after she was fully dressed and coiffed and
made-up and then merely wandered around the over-furnished rooms flicking here and there
with the end of an immaculately clean duster; a cigarette burned in its holder pivoting on her lips
whilst the expression on her face resembled a bemused Duchess in reduced circumstances forced
into imitating one of her hazily remembered tweenies. And she never got out of bed to dust or to
do anything much before mid-day.
Physically, she was not tall and, by the time I knew her, generously padded but well-
corseted. She suffered from poor circulation and appallingly bad feet. Her chiropodist was her
confessor. Jan dressed beautifully, always in neat, well-tailored two-piece suits, occasionally in
the height of summer in a sensible silk shirt-waister. Ed made sure she was suitably bejewelled,
as befitted the elder head of a prominent local family. She was therefore a knowing yet oddly
innocent repository for many of his cash-bought pieces of jewellery, undeclared in the business’s
books and being saved for the proverbial rainy day. I should rather say ‘hoarded’ for there was
something rather Fagin-ish about Ed’s collections, slaked with conspiratorial childish secrecy.
The opening of the jewel box entertained many of my slack-jawed London friends who were
agog at the sight of what was the equivalent of a fabulous pirate’s hoard disinterred from a desert
island cache.
To occupy and fill her yawning acreage of time, Jan watched television mostly, occasionally
with us and she rarely went out. Once a week, regularly as though the appointment was
clockwork, she went to some friends. Well, the Scotts were in fact customers of Ed’s, one of the
regular ‘privates’. Occasionally Jan tottered - for her feet were a miracle of the chiropodist’s art -
to a local tearoom where she had lunch, after having collected her pension. Whether she was
lonely, I don’t know although one could be forgiven for thinking that although life had given her
security, the comfort had come at a cruel cost.
Because Jan rose so late and the flat was quiet and because the morning has always been my
best time, I started to write my novel about Michael Hannah, after a session at which, I would
walk along to Ed’s shop just before lunch where we would have a sandwich. I found that not
only did I like writing but that those to whom I read were enthusiastic. Maybe, I thought …
Maybe this is MY future, regardless of what Ed might decide to do. But lives require more
substance than to be supported on wings and prayers and I knew there would come a time when I
could no longer continue in my current role of sassenach totty … Even I was getting tired of it.
On Sundays we went for ‘a run’ in the car which always ended up at a country hotel, all with
brave names like the Mains of Doon or the Braes of Bard or – and this is a real name – The
Lands of Loyal. Thus I saw even more of deep, real Scotland at the weekend than during the
week. Jan loved these outings, gossiping and relating occasions of historical family significance
which infuriated Ed who had heard her tales many times before. They usually ended up these
Sunday expeditions at least at loggerheads if not at fully-declared war.
Jan always insisted on paying for this Sunday ‘tea’, the ‘high’ variety and ‘a wee drink for
Edmund’. Edmund was very much one for the ‘wee drinks’. Strangely, I came to the relationship
not being much of an inebriate despite my years in rock ‘n’ roll, although I have to say that I was
pretty much a pushover when it came to cocktail time and surrendered to excess with an almost
pre-destined alacrity and have since become a devotee, a connoisseur of the sun’s position vis a
vis the nearest yardarm wherever on the planet I find myself.
 Ed’s boat however had long been launched on the River Sauce but his acquaintance with the
vessel had not made him a happy drunken sailor for there was nothing remedial that anyone
could have achieved with this example of the inebriate Scot. With his drinking, and after the
initial deceptive euphoria, came depression and maudlin and gloom and then anger and temper
and recriminations and blame and castigation of the world and his foes who, even though friends
of long and proven standing, were all, in his cups, in conspiracy against him. I am hard pressed
to think of another close relationship that Ed maintained other than his relationship with his
mother, which was not what I would describe as a truly loving one. Indeed, Ed would often row
with her viciously and these flare-ups would occasion her being sent off to Dundee for a while
where she would be dumped, like a piece of surplus furniture in repository or a broken pot at the
restorer’s, at the Dunella Hotel in Broughty Ferry. He would drive her there, both of them
sulkily, seethingly silent as the Volvo estate car crossed and re-crossed the Forth Bridge, as
though bearing a disgruntled dowager queen off to banishment in the depths of outer royal
displeasure. It was all rather mediaeval, like Henry and Eleanor. I sympathised with her but she
never gave me cause to further my concern. There was nothing I could ever have done.
Writing this now, a third of a century later, I find it difficult to understand what it was that I
was attracted to in this man of such dark behaviour and association. In hindsight, our situation
made for us all being old before our time for there was little other society for Ed and I in
Edinburgh amongst younger peers. My previously open world closed in as though I had passed
through Traitor’s Gate and was confined in The Tower merely awaiting the execution of the pre-
signed warrant. I think that possibly, at the time, I thought that I had nowhere else to go as I
realised early on that I was not in love, merely floundering in the Bog of Lust and no, the Bog of
Lust is not a well known Scottish country hotel serving Sunday teas.
Neither was I admitting to anyone that I might have made a mistake. I couldn’t. The thought
of all my London friends being able to say ‘I told you so’, was untenable. Do bear in mind that
my major motive for wanting to remain with Ed was the rampant love affair which was still
boiling as fiercely as ever between David Minns, my flatmate and the divine Mister M, Freddie
Mercury. I had something to live up to. I sort of needed to prove to myself that I could ‘do it’ too
and I didn’t need ‘them’.
However the seal was finally set on my new situation when my mother came up to Auld
Reekie – one of the names for Edinburgh – to visit my new home. After she had seen the result
of yet another of my intemperate life-decisions, she might have concluded that this latest pass in
my life was akin to my electing to read sociology at University in 1965 – It had indeed been I,
and I alone, who had chosen the damn ‘ology’ in the face of more sensible options that she could
have understood and therefore my pride forced me to stay the distance.
I suspect that the same pride and stubbornness was affecting the situation in Edinburgh
twelve years later. There could be no changing course and definitely no going back. And mother,
I intuit, only just beginning to come out of the homo-denial my situation had prompted in her,
was perhaps thinking that if homo I was to be, then homo in this big flat with all those fancy
antiques and a Volvo could be made to be reasonably acceptable even within her blinkered
perspectives constructed in the stern shadow of the Malvern Hills where papa, remember, not
only sat on the local Magistrates’ Bench but was its chairman.
Poor darlings, poor me … the Land That Time Forgot exercised a punishing thrall for those
whose heads were above the parapet. If I wasn’t always feeling so sorry for myself, I could have
felt very sorry for them. But we’re a selfish species, especially the genus ‘I’, often cruelly
immune to the feelings of others.
 Chapter Two

The Ring

It was turning out to be a very circular life, in more ways than the obvious. I believe that
nowadays, 2005, when the subject of gay marriage is not only a social option but a political
agendum, aping straight people’s affairs and exchanging rings signifying commitment is quite
the thing. Well, no ring was ever produced in the relationship between Ed and I so the title of this
chapter rules that ring thing out. So why ‘The Ring’?
Quite early on in our relationship, Ed made it clear that he was not averse to spending time
in London and so the eight hour motorway trip south and then again north on the M1, M6, and A
74 become more than a mere rite of passage. It was a lifeline which made living in Edinburgh
possible for both myself and for Ed too, who in truth had no great love for Scotland. It happened
to be where he had been born and where he earned his living but in his mid-thirties, he was
beginning to realise that there could be another life. He rather enjoyed mixing with my friends,
many of whom basked in more than a degree of fame and success – Freddie Mercury, The
Forbes family, Tim Curry and Peter Straker to name but a few. Down and back, south to north, I
could not even count the number of times I was to make the round trip journey to London in the
next eighteen months but our particular ring cycle was as essential to understanding our life as
William Harvey’s identification of the circulation of the blood had been to medicine.
Ed Murray was no stranger to London, either. In his early twenties he claimed that he had
often been invited to spend time with the pop star Cliff Richard with whom he and a friend from
Dundee - to whom Ed referred to as ‘Mick’ - became chummy, always upon the behest of one of
the singer’s secretaries, Pat Hind. I have to mention that Ed, highly confident of his sexual
attraction and endowment, was as promiscuous a gay man as I had myself become and in those
heady days of the mid-seventies we thought nothing of sharing our passion with others. Other
than the ‘respectable’ gay establishments we went to such as Christopher Hunter’s Country
Cousin in Kings Road, I fear that the heaths, commons and down-and-dirty gay bars still featured
on our calling list and were to do so throughout our relationship. Threesomes and other
combinations of personnel in sexual situations were far from uncommon. Fidelity and
monogamy were never bywords in our relationship.
Hence, the absence of any appearance of ‘the ring thing’. Ours was not an engagement. I had
learned a few years earlier from Alan Zubik, the master of sexual generosity and I had obviously
learned too well. I suppose Ed’s and my modus vivendi was all rather shocking, really. Except
that … I really do remember feeling that such wanton behaviour was not the best means of
indulging a newly forged relationship but nevertheless it was the promiscuous ethos that had
come to brand ‘the seventies’. The gay thing, now out of the closet, seemed to trample the
conventional, neo-hetero example in the rush to be outer, and louder and prouder than we as gay
men had been permitted to be for years. I eschewed my feelings although I have forgotten what
enabled me to do so. Maybe the ‘che sera, sera’ philosophy or maybe the arrant confidence that,
in the words of Bob Marley’s song, “Everything’s gonna be alright …” I suppose I thought
that as long as those ‘passing through’ our nights were not there in the morning and Ed and I
woke up together and alone, that everything, ergo, was indeed all right. Wrong. All very wrong.
And having mentioned Country Cousin, I have to mention Freddie Mercury’s thirtieth
birthday party which took place there in late 1976, a little later than his actual birthday on
September 5th as Queen were still busy touring and promoting their album A NIGHT AT THE
OPERA. David Minns had been put in charge of the event which was the occasion when he
became more closely acquainted with Cherry Brown, Christopher Hunter’s assistant and the
maitresse d’ at the cabaret restaurant.
 Freddie’s Thirtieth Birthday Invitation
In a way Cherry deserves a book to herself. In her time with Christopher most of the beaux
mondains and belles mondaines of all five continents had been shown to their tables by her
ineffably charming and efficient self. She was not to be lucky in love herself although she
brought stalwart support to those of her friends who fell on and off the love train and indeed two
such were David and Freddie. Freddie too adored Cherry, trusted her and continued their
friendship long after he and David were, comme on dit but not literally, dead in the water. Cherry
provided succour, lodging, support and shelter and all from the tiny flat she shared with her two
adored red setters, Scarlet and Rupert. Cherry had a big strong heart; I just wish she’d had a
bigger, stronger liver.
Freddie’s party saw Country Cousin’s restaurant decked with a huge trestle table set the
length of the room, dressed with a cloth of white linen and the whole excessively garlanded and
swagged with flowers which were also placed in profligate, tall arrangements the length of the
table’s surface. The idea was to create a tableau of indulgence and excess. Freddie had at last hit
the big time and he wanted everyone to know it whilst sharing in it. We all, around sixty of us,
couldn’t help but know it.
We were dressed glamorously according to both the exhortation on the invitation and the
nature of the celebration which, for Freddie was also a rite of passage not only from one decade
to another but from his past to his future.
The occasion was also notable for its being the last that his seventies set of friends would be
together. The great whirligig which had been our life for three years was set to whiz off into the
stratosphere and become a memory. Sharon Arden would peel off to marry Ozzie Osbourne and
become a legend, John Reid would not survive as Queen’s manager, David Minns would not last
as Freddie’s lover, Tim Curry would leave London for America, Malcolm Grey and many others
would die prematurely, Mary Austin would have her children and QUEEN would cease to be a
band of intimate proportions and thus would conquer the world. The party was like Kings Cross
station on the underground system of our lives, a huge nexus where people were changing trains
for unknown destinations.
The menu was exotic and gargantuan, I think we each had been allotted at least a whole
lobster and there were platters piled high with peeled king prawns and other exotic delicacies
which in those days, thirty years ago, were really exotic. The main courses were to Freddie’s
taste, both English and spiced Indian dishes together. It was the first of the great rock ‘n’ roll
parties for which Queen and Freddie in particular became famous and of course there were more
bottles of champagne than we had sticks to shake at them. It was also a wonderfully happy event,
capped by cabaret performances which in themselves were capped by the appearance of a belly
dancer accompanied by a giant python which writhed and contorted and threatened to disappear
down and into the dancing lady’s crevasses and orifices, at which promise grown men were seen
to faint! It was a suitable finale to Freddie’s prophetic progress towards his own Jerusalem.
But back to the real world. The ambitions of Ed’s former lover, George Elas, to be a big,
famous London antiques dealer had been semi-fulfilled in that he had acquired, first, shared
space in Grey’s Antiques Market before ultimately leasing ultra-expensive arcade premises in
Belgravia which he stocked with his share of the inventory settlement he and Ed had worked out
on the dissolution of their partnership. The stock he had selected proved slow to move. It had,
after all, been seen by those London dealers who would come regularly to Scotland and rejected
even at the comparatively affordable Scottish prices. At London prices, no one was interested in
this ‘soiled’ stock. Furthermore, Ed had always known that George had no particular flair or
talent for the business and that his involvement had been purely circumstantial, rather like my
own. No. Exactly like my own. Ed watched with no pleasure at all as George’s newly established
enterprise floundered. Ed’s own options and opportunities, other than setting up shop again, were
also proving very limited as well as slow to materialise and the cost of George’s departure,
although not crippling, had been at a price. Buying for private clients specifically was a
whimsical and impracticable choice and using the sale rooms as a retail outlet was also an
uncertain course.
One of the reasons why selling through the sale rooms would rarely allow an article to reach
its fullest commercial potential was the existence of another circular arrangement, one which
enjoyed the sobriquet ‘The Ring’. If a dealer was in it, he could make The Ring work for him, if
he was without its pale, the hope of buying ‘well’ at a sale were in the main by definition dashed.
The existence of The Ring at any auction was entirely illegal although its existence was
acknowledged even by the auctioneers who took into account its function when, for example,
setting reserve prices.
The Ring worked something like this …
After viewing the contents of the auction sales at the rooms of such as Phillips and Lyon and
Turnbull, the Edinburgh dealers who had been invited into The Ring would meet, usually in the
bar of a local hotel. Having compared their catalogues and the lots in which they were interested,
decide who was going to bid for the particular items from the floor of the saleroom. Of course,
this arrangement did not guarantee that the Ring’s members would be successful. Any member
of the public could outbid, of course, but to have attempted to do so would have resulted in the
‘punter’ being bid up to a foolishly extravagant point only to be left with an item for which he or
she had overpaid horribly, on occasion far more than would have been charged at retail in the
antique dealer’s shop. Thus, with the bids secured, the dealers would meet again after the sale, in
the very same hotel bar and conduct their own auction sale, the dealer who knew that he had a
home for a particular lot paying the difference between the auction price and The Ring’s price.
The excess money would be then put into a pot and divided up between the number of dealers
who had been in The Ring for that auction sale. Other dealers in London have later assured me
that any costs incurred by The Ring in bidding up an aggressive punter were borne equally by the
members of The Ring although I would have to be convinced that such companionable altruism
would have been found north of the border.
There was a regular Saturday morning sale at one of the auction houses and Ed would
always return to the shop, where I would be waiting, with a wad of cash, much of it in very
grubby used notes. He was always drunk out of his brain as the dealers inevitably drank their
way through their own auction and thus compensated the owner/proprietor of the pub or hotel in
which they met. The landlords would have been open to prosecution if the authorities had
swooped.
I dreaded those Saturdays. Ed could be a truly horrible drunk. His speech would lapse into a
slurred parody of what he thought to be a heavy Jewish or Yiddish accent. I fancy he believed
that his father had been Jewish although whether Beldowski senior had been a child of Israel, I
know not.
 So, to be in The Ring, a dealer had to have an overt business profile and that was best
achieved by having a shop and this was Ed’s dilemma when ‘reviewing the situation’ of his
future …
The cash which came from The Ring was undeclared and untaxed and had become a
fundamental part of the dealers’ income. Thus, cash sloshed around in the antiques trade like
testosterone in a teenage libido. Much was bought with cash and sold in the shops for cash and
these items, although ostensibly clearly recorded for VAT (Value Added Tax) purposes, were
manoeuvred around the stock books, swapping identities with those goods which were
irreparably branded with legality. The VAT was collected from antiques dealers under what was
referred to with bitter loathing by the operatives as The Special Scheme which involved some
mathematical calculation to arrive at the amount owed. Or, even, the amount owing although it
was a brazen dealer who wouldn’t always make sure that they owed at least a token amount to
the Revenue. Visits from the VAT inspectors were regular and ruthless, for obvious reasons and
grown men shivered as they, like drowning men, saw their lives flash before their eyes when a
taxman’s eyebrow was raised during the audit or a finger was pointed to a certain item and the
request made to see its entry into the stock book. Woe be unto he – or she – who had
conveniently omitted to ascribe a stock number to the selected item.
However, despite the shades of misdeeds and malpractice north of the border, both of us
continued to enjoy my life in London whilst the seeds sprouted in Ed’s mind of what else might
happen in his. His mother was the strongest tie which bound him to Scotland. He had obviously
determined to look after her and whilst the facility of the hotel Dunella existed where she could
still enjoy something of what remained of her own life in Dundee, Ed found that living with her
was possible. Just.
I, in turn, began to thoroughly enjoy my non-show biz now-life although I confess I took
huge comfort in my old friends. It was a deep pleasure to still be able to discuss the intricacies of
problems and situations where I had no axe left to grind. If asked my opinion, which Freddie, for
example, did a lot, I could reply knowing that he knew that I was speaking both from experience
and sincerity. It was about this time that discontent was beginning to spread between the
members of QUEEN for example about their continued representation by John Reid and the
name of Jim Beach began to crop up more and more as a potential manager. I remember one
very happy Christmas, that of 1976, which we spent with David Minns and Freddie at Werter
Road, taking advantage of TV and snuggles in the new underground room which Charles Storr
had excavated and fitted out for me. The ‘snug’ was a crazy undertaking, ignoring all planning
permissions and although it gave the flat another room, its bastard status, entirely illegitimate,
caused problems when I came to sell the property.
But that Christmas, dinner cooked and eaten, we all felt very grown up and independent,
until Freddie of course had to leave and return to spend the remainder of his Christmas either
with his family or with Mary and hers.
It was not too long into 1977 before the severance money John Reid had settled on me began
to burn holes in my cheque book and I started to buy bits and pieces of antique furniture myself
with the intention of dealing in them, anything to repel the day when I might have to think again
of doing a proper job. I still had expenses, notably my Putney flat which was not to be home to
David and Freddie for long.
I am sad to report that, after that memorable Christmas, relations cooled somewhat between
us for a while, not irredeemably or in any way terminally but there was an incident. Rather like
The War of Jenkins’ Ear became one of those bewildering moments in English history, the
incident of The Cocktail Cabinet was one of my own. It ran thus and, I reluctantly concede,
occurred entirely at my instigation although was not my sole fault.
I had bought from a shop in Perth a beautifully made nineteen-thirties cocktail cabinet
decorated with applied bamboo motifs, in perfect condition. It was not Ed’s sort of purchase at
all but, as it was obviously mine, it encouraged us to think that maybe we would never clash in
the purchasing of stock, either for individual or mutual gain. I paid whatever I paid for the piece
and we took it down to London the next time we ‘went south’ as Edinburgh people referred to
the journey to London.
As soon as Freddie walked into the Putney apartment, he saw the cabinet, loved it and asked
if he could buy it. Of course, he saw it, loved it and asked to buy it. It was what I had been
planning on since its initial purchase as Freddie was at that point furnishing his newly acquired
apartment at 16 Stafford Terrace just behind Kensington High Street in a variety of chinoiserie
styles and I instinctively knew what he would be looking for. Ed encouraged me to ask what I
felt was fair as the piece was magnificent.
So I duly named my price. Freddie thanked me and said he would think it over. The next
day, by which time David had been deputed to complete the negotiation, he informed me that a
state of bargaining existed between us and that the opening limits were so way below what I had
asked that, silly queen that I was, I ‘took umbridge’, professed outrage and told the pair of them
exactly what I thought about them and promptly put the cocktail cabinet into a London auction
room. It taught me a great lesson which was that to sell to or buy from or lend to or borrow from
friends is the riskiest course of action possible. I would have made such a rubbish antique dealer!
David and Freddie, on their equally high horses, also ‘took umbridge’ and a state of bristle
replaced the state of bargaining between us for a week or so. Although the stand-off didn’t last
long, it certainly hastened the point at which Freddie decided that schlepping along the length of
the Kings Road and over to Putney to tryst with his lover was unnecessary now that he was a big
rich pop star and so a few weeks later in mid-1977 he rented a flat for them in Dovehouse Street,
off Kings Road in Chelsea, close to the Fire Station. It was a love nest but one which turned out
to have been built from the thorniest briars and twigs.
And the cocktail cabinet? Did it sell for more than I would have settled with Freddie?
Probably not. Another lesson in how to never mix friends and business.
Freddie and David’s move from Werter Road gave me the chance to refurbish completely
and for the first time the place was fully carpeted. As I could afford the mortgage repayment for
the time being, the flat was refurnished with the intention that when Ed and I were not using it, it
was left unoccupied. I think it was perhaps here that I first enjoyed the luxury of having two
homes, one which thankfully persists to this day although with a different cast and entirely
different properties.
I also discovered that my decorative taste was entirely different to Ed’s and I learned that
between couples of any sexuality, this is often the case. Whereas I loved clutter and objets which
were not intrinsically valuable, and pieces with family and sentimental association, Ed’s likes
were for the exchangeable. In his Edinburgh flat, I cannot remember ever seeing a personal
photograph on display, nothing to divert attention from the valuable clocks, furniture, carpets and
paintings, of which he had several important Scottish works by the likes of McTaggart, Israels,
Lamond and Robert Gemmell Hutchinson and that Impressionist school. So, I thus learned, if not
the art of compromise then the art of backing off arguments about taste and style when living in a
house you don’t own! How straight married couples achieve even a semblance of harmony is
beyond my belief except that it must surely be that men have learned to merely shut up and
pretend they have no taste whatsoever. That any man could sleep in the majority of bedrooms
designed and executed by women is a matter merely for wonder and the comfort of their
consciences.
As Ed and I were seldom in Edinburgh for long and given that Jan was ensconced like a
limpet in that favourite wing chair in the drawing room where we were, our local social life – one
which I gaily tried to engineer and generally fluff up – was of the minus variety. I believe we
entertained as ‘Ed and Dais’, only once, a fellow dealer called Eric Davidson and his wife Jane
and perhaps Ed’s friend Kenny Jackson, another dealer with a small premises but a huge ego
opposite Ed’s own in Dundas Street. Kenny was a strange man, stylish and more inclined on the
decorative side of the antiques trade with a strong connection to the London dealers and interiors
specialists. He was forlornly in love all the time I knew him, desperately hoping a young Italian
from Glasgow might one day be his and his alone and in the vain meantime, during which he
pursued none other, he lived sparely with his mother, Joan, a lady as huge as Jan Murray was
small although equally as isolated. Oh those boys and their mothers. I was not to be finished with
mothers for a very long time, mine or other people’s.
Significantly, for the future, Tim Curry came to stay once. I had not been as close friends
with him since our meeting in Los Angeles as Tim had been working mostly in the USA and I
had had my hands full with others’ careers in London. But geography is a moveable feast and
thus when back in England for a time he called one day and asked if he could visit and came up
to Edinburgh for a few days. It was the foundation for our later friendship and all three of us, he,
Ed and I, got on very well together, Tim enjoying the freedom of roaming around the countryside
unrecognised.
Just before he arrived, I had several more unexpected bouts of what I can only describe as
withdrawal symptoms from my old life. From suddenly thinking that I was ‘somebody’ to
realising that my somebody-ness was entirely reliant on my association with the rich and famous
for whom I worked, was a horrible shock. I felt powerless and vulnerable, as though someone
had stolen all my clothes. The memory of my association with The Playhouse faded rapidly in
the minds of those folk in Edinburgh with whom we did spend time and although I enjoyed Ed’s
other dealer friends such as The Edwards family who ran a porcelain and paintings speciality
almost next door to Ed’s Raphael premises, I knew it was a circumstantial and thus a hollow
pleasure.
Out and about in the town, meetings, in whatever bar we might have occasionally visited,
with such casual acquaintances as Alan Alexander, a locally celebrated painter were rare.
Occasionally I saw Patrick Brooks whom I had first met during Peter Straker’s first solo show on
the Fringe in 1974 and who is now, I note, in charge of the whole Edinburgh Fringe. But we
were hardly friends, merely polite acquaintances. Popping in to chat with Ed and George’s
friends in the Scottish leather boys club who organised various sexual weekends masquerading
as motorbike enthusiasts’ meets was interesting and yet hardly diary candy; neither did the
frisson of danger when visiting their shabby untidy home ever develop into a hard on and I SO
wanted it to, such was the dearth of stimulation!
 My - ergo, our - social life seemed to have slovenly reverted to the cottaging and cruising
and the combing of commons, heaths, lay bys and byways, time-wasting pastimes which I rather
fancied might have at last been over and done with. However, the old habits were dying hard and
even in the presence of new hoops, old dogs really do prefer the tricks they know. Ouch! I cannot
now remember which of us was the propellant force behind this regressive behavioural ‘slide’,
but I fancy that Ed wasn’t averse. After all, he was an old hand in the relationship game and
knew where the path usually led. I was merely the sorcerer’s apprentice.
But then, here’s a thought which possibly impinges on gay – as opposed to heterosexual –
partnerships: If the plural of louse is lice, would that make the plural of spouse, spice? If so,
there was plenty of the latter amidst many of the former.
 Chapter Three

As Mabel browsed the menu page

She flexed the muscles of her age:
“I did enjoy a curry so,
I had my first one in Lucknow … You know …
It really is an awful waste
To have forgotten such a taste:
My memory is now so slow
And it seems such an age ago … You know …”

Now I’ve started a new chapter, I realise that I risk being misunderstood. Life wasn’t all
desolation although in August 2008, a ‘researched’ report announced that Edinburgh was one of
the least happy places in the United Kingdom. But one shouldn’t live life by researched reports.
Anecdote is just as accurate a yardstick.
My year in Edinburgh brought several great unexpected and unheralded pleasures and two
of these took the form of people. Mabel Aitken and Nina Myskow; two women who were then at
opposite ends of life’s continuum. Oh, what it is to be able to look back. It’s so much more
satisfying than the forward variety of vision and I now so empathise with the millions of Aunt
Mabels there must be and have been in the world.
Of course, Mabel was not a real aunt to Ed as indeed neither had been Belle nor Aggie but
all three women had been close friends in their youth. When I met her, Mabel Aitken must have
been in her early eighties and was my first conscious experience of engaging with a survivor of
the British raj in India and a daughter of that imperial past in the environs of Dundee, for the city
had been amongst the richest in the kingdom for many years due to the jute trade with the sub-
continent which centred on the town.
Jute, such a staple crop in British imperial India, was imported from the sub-continent and
then worked into the rope and twine and by-products produced in the many factories which in
ancillary function to the docks, had developed in Dundee. Associated with the jute shipments, all
manner of other wealth was imported onto the quays and wharves of the city to be traded both in
Scotland and ‘down south’ as my friend Doris Foreman has attested to, her own father having
been a Jute merchant.
Mabel had arrived in India at the height of the raj, her husband having been involved in
commerce rather than government. In her mind, when I met her, she still lived the life she had
taken to as a duck would to water in that beautiful Indian bungalow with its cadre of servants.
She would show photographs of that time as proudly as a mother would display photographs of
her children for Mabel had managed to avoid children of her own. But 1947 had finally seen an
end to that life for so many Mabels and she and her husband reluctantly returned to the mother
country where sunshine and servants were as much on the ration as rice and bananas. I imagine
Mabel would have gladly sacrificed eating bananas for the rest of her life as long as she knew
that there was someone around to peel one for her should she change her mind. I rather think
Mabel’s servants would have liked their mistress for she turned being a gracious – if imperious -
lady into a profession.
Mabel had been widowed for sometime and in her dotage had made the decision to give up
‘the big house’ along the road in Broughty Ferry and had moved into the Hotel Dunella to be
cared for not as a typical hotel guest nor even an ordinary resident of which there were several,
all called ‘Miss’ Something, this nonintimate form of address continuing even after years of
acquaintance. No, Mabel arranged that she was to be entertained, more as an honoured visiting
dowager in the house on the Dunella grounds occupied by the owners. Mabel was magnificent:
authoritative, demanding, gracious, brusque, ruthless, cavalier, shameless … All the qualities
required of a worldy grande dame had been impeccably auto-grafted onto her Dundee rootstock.
Jan Murray was terrified of her but had been thrust inescapably beneath Mabel’s umbrella.
When Ed had sold Jan’s home in Dundee after Sidney died, in the absence of Aggie and Belle,
Mabel took it upon herself to be the Widow Murray’s protector. Gee, thanks, Mabel … I’m sure
the two of them bitched each other horribly to others and behind each other’s backs although
they behaved quite beautifully when together. They were a sort of double act, their own Mapp
and Lucia, although often the accents dropped and broadened when something particularly
horrible or shocking or even slightly immoral happened to one of their acquaintance and they
became just two gossiping old ladies in the snug bar of any pub.
Ed and I often, when in Dundee, visited Mabel and on several occasions included her in
Jan’s Sunday afternoon ‘runs’. Ed, being no fool, knew that there were still grounds for his
having ‘expectations’ of Mabel who was always waving her well-advertised last will and
testament at people, figuratively speaking of course. Mabel knew that to be taken care of, she
needed to be able to bribe. That’s why I included ‘shameless’ as one of her great qualities
because it’s one which I myself now recognise as indispensable as I too totter towards old age.
I remember one of her milestone birthdays being celebrated at Gleneagles Hotel, that
pretentious and portentous Victorian pile which marks the centre of the famous golf course.
Mabel loved going there for lunch as much as many a Mayfair lady, Margaret Argyll to whit,
would gravitate to The Ritz. It was at Gleneagles that I watched Mabel give one of her greatest
performances, the great lady declining to take off her hat, tipping left and right with an
ostentation which was at the same time as charmingly intimate as the Queen distributing Maundy
Money to a line-up of the deserving poor. The undiscriminating recipients of her largesse that
day were, in order, the door porter who welcomed her, then whoever took her coat followed by
the maitre d’ who led her and her party through the lobby and into the restaurant and finally the
waiter who attended her. Seated, with perfect sweetness but steely firmness she quickly assessed
the room to confirm that she had been accorded ‘the best table’ and then, ensuring that all eyes
were upon us, and in a tone necessarily only a little louder than audible conversation, she
commanded Ed to choose ‘some suitable wine, anything as long as it’s white …’ and instructed
us to choose whatever we wanted from the lunch menu, ‘… anything, anything. Expense is no
object on my birthday!’
She knew precisely how she wanted her birthday to be celebrated not merely by us but the
whole dining room and she was not to be thwarted by indecision and faffing about. God, she was
magnificent. I just hope that by the time I have arrived at that age, I will somehow have
metamorphosed to be able both to project and implement that same image of queen-bee absolute
which Mabel radiated that day. Of course, she has since died and I trust to both her taste and
savoir faire that she didn’t try and tip Saint Peter.
 Although the two subjects of this chapter never met, they should have done but the
circumstances never coalesced for me to engineer a Sunday tea with Mabel and the next great
human revelation which Dundee and Fife and, more specifically, Saint Andrews provided me. I
had first met Nina Myskow at Elton John’s concert in Dundee in 1976. Readers of
APPOINTMENTS may remember that when I prevented Nina from accessing the backstage area
at the concert, I had no idea she was the editor of JACKIE magazine, a D.C Thompson
publication and one of the most influential teenage media organs of the day, occupying a
powerful position in the vital media world by which we all lived and died. However, the price
that life exacted from Nina for this privilege was that she could not live in the exciting fast-
moving London metropolis. Instead, she had a flat in Saint Andrews rather than one in St Johns
Wood and thus she made the commute to her editorial desk across the Tay rather than the
Thames. But, perhaps that’s me being a little too metrocentric?
Nina was and is tough, principled and fearless and I have, if not always agreed with her, then
certainly always admired her. Her family lived for a long time in South Africa although whether
it was from that culture she picked up her pioneering, crusading style and her rugged
individualism, I know not. Ed and I and Nina spent many happy rainy Sunday afternoons in her
flat overlooking the cold North Sea and her very presence just across the Forth Bridge made me
feel whilst staying in Edinburgh that I was less of an alien life-form. Soon after this time in both
our lives, Nina made her own inexorable way south and found her feet instantly as one of the
doyennes of the Fleet Street column before accelerating her celebrity as ‘that nasty woman’ on
television’s NEW FACES. She must also have done almost as much for the colour pink as the
entire gay revolution. Thanks, Nina.
The summer of 1977 brought a timely telephone call and more trips on those northern
motorways. Bryan Forbes has saved me and my old bacon several times in my life and the 1977
call offered a super bacon-saving opportunity. Bryan had written a contemporised version of the
script of the 1946 film classic NATIONAL VELVET. Whether the idea was that Elizabeth
Taylor might, in middle age, once again play the now grown-up Velvet Brown, the original
film’s eponymous heroine, I don’t know. But whoever, whatever, Bryan had secured the
production with a superb cast, his wife Nanette Newman having been at last persuaded to play
the now grown-up Velvet Brown. The teenaged Tatum O’Neal played Nanette’s adopted
orphaned, American niece Sarah Brown and THE SOUND OF MUSIC’s secret weapon, the
Canadian actor Christopher Plummer stood up masterfully as Velvet’s husband and adoptive
father to Sarah. The young and still relatively undiscovered Anthony Hopkins was to play a
tough-talking but soft-hearted horse master and … and …
And Bryan wanted someone to oversee one of the locations where scenes were to be filmed
at a riding arena in Charnock Richard in Lancashire, hitherto merely notable as a motorway pull-
in stop just south of Leyland near Manchester. Would I care to be the location manager? Oh,
DEAR, DEAR Bryan! Of course I would. I was once again allocated the assistance of his
daughter Sarah Forbes (now Standing) with whom I had remained close friends after having been
thrown together during the Playhouse season in Edinburgh. She had rumbustiously thrown
herself into London life and other than becoming noted in café society circles, a regular subject
of the Nigel Dempster gossip column, was just about to have a book of rather good poems
published by Graham Tarrant at Gee Whizzard. And by ‘rather good’, I mean so in an entirely
non-patronising manner, considering her youth. She was still only seventeen.
 We had become firm friends, despite the thirteen year gap in our ages, and we both kept
journals. She had always been a diarist and she inspired me to begin one of my own, a practice I
have maintained to this day, albeit often erratically, but from which I derive one of the greatest
pleasures I have ever known. If I have stolen this quotation from another, I apologise but I had a
half-baked idea which ran thus: ‘If I keep a diary, then one day it might well keep me …’ In
those days, Sarah and I would spend hours on the phone reading particularly private passages to
each other, always about those whose acquaintance we had in common. I have since appreciated
the significance of my aphorism. My diary keeps me not in pecuniary terms of gain but in the
constant luxury of being able to dip into almost thirty years on a roller-coaster more exciting than
any ride at any funfair on earth.
I think that Bryan Forbes’ co-opting of his daughter onto the payroll of INTERNATIONAL
VELVET was also motivated by her family’s attempt to put a brake on her London social life. It
must be very strange for parents who are well-known celebrities themselves to have to read all
about the adult activities of their daughter with people of more than questionable reputation. I
shall never know the feeling of watching one’s dearly loved off-spring fledging and I know that
Bryan and Nanette’s must have been acutely worrying, the whole situation accompanied by the
usual confrontations. I reflect now that it is indeed a privilege to have been close friends with
three generations of the same family for Sarah now has her own eldest daughter, India and who
has encountered a sort-of repeat situation. India is as definite and as different to her mother as
Sarah was to Nanette. Three wonderful British women. And, of course, time being what it is,
Sarah and her mother now row very much the same boat, one into which Indie will undoubtedly
clamber when she too has had her time.
Sarah and I arrived with great enthusiasm in our rented car at Charnock Richard as night had
fallen and booked into the hotel attendant on the motorway services area. There was no local
village or town. It was a lonely, windswept and rainy place and the empty riding arena in the
light of the following day looked damp, desolate and awfully large, with the atmosphere of a
cricket pavilion at Christmas. One of our jobs was to drum up an audience sufficiently large to be
filmed as though it was a real crowd gathered to watch Olympic equestrian competition, the plot
of the movie being that the young Sarah Brown ultimately emulates her aunt’s historic
achievement on a mount sired by that legendary horse ridden by Velvet in the race. The
emulation takes place not in Sarah Brown’s riding in the Grand National but in participating in
team events in international Olympic competition hence the title of the film. INTERNATIONAL
VELVET.
From the start, it was going to be a tough call, finding this audience. We ran stories in local
newspapers, wangled appearances on local radio stations and even managed to dredge up a
television spot on a local magazine programme. When the cast and horse boxes and attendant
crews arrived, there was at least a pulse to the location and after Bryan had been very inventive
and strategic with camera angles, we managed to achieve a reasonable facsimile of an audience.
However, I must add that we had had several dozen life-size silhouette cut-outs prepared by the
art department, though the shame of having to use them would have been unbearable. Certainly
nothing to brag about on a CV!
But on a more flesh and blood plane, it was good to meet Georgina Simpson, the actor
Anthony Andrews’ wife, once again. As an actress, she was also one of the riders as were Sarah
Bullen and the eternally cheerful Martin Neill; another old friend was Keith Baxter’s on-and-off
love interest Richard Warwick who had been so tauntingly sexy in Lindsay Anderson’s film IF
and, finally, the young Daniel Abinieri, son to the father. We had a wonderful time. However
interminable the filming process, at last ‘the wrap’ was announced and so the circus moved on
and we all went our separate ways, leaving only patches of that familiar bleached grass … There
was little to remember, least, in my opinion, being Anthony Hopkins’ performance, one which I
would imagine he is content to leave buried. Hannibal Lector was nowhere in evidence.
Both Sarah and I were glad of our wages although I don’t think either of us would ever
claim any great success from this venture. The film itself has since gone on to be part of the
essential currency of the rite of passage enjoyed by thousands of young girls who are mad about
horses, the success being helped by the love story which Bryan wove through the plot involving
Tatum’s character and that of the captain of the American team. This role was played by
Geoffrey Byron, the handsome young son of Anna, a Hollywood actress and the stepson of
Anna’s husband, the celebrated American poet Robert Nathan. Sarah Forbes had formed rather
an attachment to this young man who needed somewhere to stay whilst he was in London. I
offered him the temporary use of my Putney flat and indeed he stayed there for a time, leaving
me with an unpaid telephone bill which, I say with due bitterness and justified rancour, remains
outstanding. As the bill was substantially transatlantic, settling it all but wiped out what I had
earned on the film. Gee, thanks, Geoffrey …
Back in Edinburgh, change had been moving apace in that Ed had hired someone to staff his
Dundas Street shop, a rather elderly gentleman who had worked for many years for Eric
Davidson, another Edinburgh dealer with whom we had been friendly. The arrival of George
Clugson left us free to ‘go south’ more often and more specifically to house-hunt. Whilst I had
been away on the film location, Ed had made a decision. He wasn’t going to have a shop but he
was going to acquire a large house, fill it with his stock and then invite his old customers to come
and buy. Should someone come to dinner and admire the cutlery, they were at liberty to buy it.
Folly? We were about to find out.
And I had finished my second novel. With THE HOLIDAYMAKERS, written ten years and
forty lifetimes ago in 1969, still safely buried in a half-forgotten box file, A SHADOW ON THE
GREEN was ready to be launched, although in those days it was entitled LEAVE HIM TO
HEAVEN. I should never have changed the title. It was the Twinkle and Michael Hannah story,
a tale only slightly disguised.
In those days, I fancied that having had many contacts in the dramatic world both with
writers and other agents during my time as a theatrical and artists manager I would be able to
grasp many a helping hand stretched out to assist me as I attempted clearing the hurdles and
obstacles in the way of any young writer. I therefore telephoned Sara Randall, my former
colleague at Barry Krost’s agency and now a very successful agent in her own right. Yes, she
assured me, she would be glad to take a look at the book.
In those AWP days - ante word processor - writing was an even more laborious conceit than
it is now. Rewrites were only undertaken from steely necessity as the re-typing involved was
truly tedious. Or, even if you were published and very famous, expensive. Final manuscripts – or
as final as submission to a publisher required – could only ever be bashed out by hand on, if you
were lucky, an electric typewriter in two copies, top and one carbon copy, with a possibility of a
third copy if the carbon paper carried the imprint of the bashed key through to the third layer of
paper. So, the precious top copy, typed in double-spaced format, was duly packed up with great
care and attention to security and posted off by recorded delivery of course. Afterwards, I came
home and waited. Most of us in search of success spend the greater part of our lives waiting.
The waiting is the most upsetting and distressing time. I can’t compare the agonising feeling
of concern to any other condition because I personally think the agony is incomparable which of
course it isn’t, I know, but to me it always was, has been, will be and is the reason why I no
longer entertain the circumstances. Even with another novel taking shape on the kitchen table
where I used to write, the other ‘I’ within me had to all but physically restrain the ‘I’ which
wanted to make daily calls to Sara Randall to see if she had finished the book. It was to be at
least three months before I received the first verdict from a publishing house and the decision
was a rejection but one, written to Sara of course, couched in the nicest possible terms although
there is no ‘nice’ way of wrapping up the bald ‘Thank-you, no’ which is at the heart of the reply.
Agents receive ‘nice’ replies; writers themselves are mercilessly told to ‘bog off’ as Compo
would have said in Roy Clarke’s LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE.
Editorial comments scribbled over precious manuscripts have also been the cause of insult
and hurt – I remember one of my books about Freddie Mercury being returned having been
considered at Faber and Faber with Roger McCrum’s gentlest and kindliest thoughts revealed in
scrawled pencil: “And who on earth would be interested in reading about this totally untalented
second-rate singer?”
And never, in all my years of scribbling, have any former contacts - other than my dear
Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman -ever been of the slightest help to me in my putative writing
career. I discovered that writers are usually the most ungenerous of friends when any whiff of
competition threatens to infiltrate the air of friendship. I have never received any offers of
introduction to literary opportunities from any writers of my acquaintance. It is why I have been
assiduous in giving every assistance to others and I trust I have not been found wanting in the
ability to encourage, support and facilitate. I find as great a pleasure in seeing a dedication or an
acknowledgement to me in another’s book as I do when any of my own has been published and I
trust that those unwilling to help me have found their satisfaction in their self-preservation.
I also learned that those, not necessarily writers, who perceive you as successful in another
field and happy and/or financially secure in your life assume that you don’t need any help at all
to achieve another form of success and that even if you do, they aren’t going to be the ones to
assist. I’ve learned, in short, that most people are incredibly jealous, unforgivingly judgemental
and pathologically ungenerous. It has, also, always amazed me how little praise or
encouragement most readers give to the writer, especially when it’s a friend who is the reader. I
very quickly discovered that I had chosen a very stony path. I was brought up with the words of a
proverb ringing in my ears. The proverb ran thus … “Sticks and stones can break your bones but
words will never hurt you.”
Don’t believe it … Never believe it.
And, conversely, silence wreaks even worse emotional havoc.
 Chapter Four

“Look, Homewood, angels …”

A journalist once asked Sophia Loren why she didn’t go out more whilst she was living in
New York:
“But here you’re in one of the most exciting cities in the world. Don’t you wonder about all
the things you’re missing?”
She apparently took little time to reply:
“No, because I’m missing nothing. Life is where I am, not some place else. When you know
that, my dear, you know a lot …”
It’s incredibly difficult to find what you’re looking for in life when you have no idea what
‘it’ is that you’re looking for. It’s also frustrating to the point where, when faced with a choice,
the seeker, faute de mieux, settles for the wrong one. Just to convince themselves they’ve found
‘it’.
Ed’s hunt for his country house fell deeply into that torturous abyss of dilemma. I must have
been of little assistance as the thought of being part of an Aga-saga in the shires, when my
greatest role until that time had been to only just about provide Sunday lunch for four in a two
bedroom flat off Putney High Street, I found hard to grasp.
Fiddle-de-dee – shan’t think about that. There was always tomorrow to think about that. In
the end, I became of even less help as my impatience overtook me and I merely acted crabby and
sulky. I didn’t care where we went as long as we went. More often than not, the spur to human
endeavour is the leaving rather than the arriving, based on the principle that where you’re bound
can’t be that much worse than where you’ve left and if it is worse, at least it’s a different worse.
The breadth of Ed’s and my search for our future encompassed a thirties house on the
Virginia Water Estate close to Bryan and Nanette, a gloomy rectory in Mitford country deep in
the Cotswolds and an ultra-dilapidated farmhouse in what had once been Somerset and now re-
titled by an imaginative bureaucrat, Avon, a name derived from the fluid presence of the river
that ran out downstream from Bristol. As far as I was concerned, Avon was a brand of cheap –
and I mean cheap – cosmetics peddled house to house by a sales team who were known
generally as Avon Ladies. That must have stymied a whole generation of stout Somerset
womenfolk who would have rather died than be called an Avon Lady.
Our goal was predicated by the twin principles of lack of money and of small being
definitely not beautiful; size mattered a great deal and big is rarely inexpensive unless it’s on one
of the further distant Hebridean isles. We had to have somewhere to put all that STUFF! All
those THINGS!
In the end, all thoughts of practicality were swept away when we were shown round a house
some few miles from Bath, a house on the main road between Bath and Frome set in six acres of
paddock, park and garden, over-looking the villages of Freshford and Limpley Stoke and yet also
in the purlieu of the adjacent village of Hinton Charterhouse. One local whom I later pressed into
defining exactly where it was that we both lived replied, country-wise, “Well, we lives nowhere,
really …”
But both Ed and I felt that the house’s location made it a little easier to find for the putative
hordes of visiting dealers who, Ed imagined, would be attending the many auction house sales
which were held both in the city of Bath, in neighbouring Bristol and the other country towns in
the area. Bear in mind that some of these dealers both home-grown and from overseas, were
hardly better than bandits and could barely read let alone decipher a map or connect two
successive sign-posts. The much-vaunted spivs of the nineteen forties and fifties had nothing on
some of these dealers many of whom would have been equally at home trading vast
consignments of marijuana. In fact I often wondered what tonnage of drugs has been carted
about the world masquerading as an impossibly impractical but very protectively packed
Victorian wardrobe. The fate of my acquaintance Christopher Plume in 2005 rather bears this
out, a pine furniture specialist, he allowed his cross-Channel goods to be used by a drugs
smuggling gang and was duly apprehended.
Thus, situated on a main road, the house we found was called Homewood and it was very
expensive, much more expensive than ones which we had been viewing and buying it would
need more money than Ed had available. Jan, Ed’s mother, had money left to her by the un-dear
departed Sidney in a kind of trust. So …
So it was decided that Jan should come with us. With her money or, rather, without it, after
she had been divested of it. Maybe it was that Jan was always coming too? Did I mind? Was I
even part of the decision? I can’t honestly remember although I did point out to Ed that Dundee
was no longer just over the nearest big bridge and that he could no longer conveniently rid
himself of his mother when she upset him. And, in those days, I might have found room in my
heart to feel sorry for her as she watched Ed juggle his own funds, willy-nilly, with her own!
Homewood was also very big, as were the grounds. The original exquisite Gothic cottage –
our cottage ornee, as Peter Wood the stage director was later to dub it – had been worked on by
some late Victorians who had, after knocking down a lot of both the former and older, original
house, added some very grand reception rooms and bedrooms, servants’ quarters, a coach house
and stabling to what was already a substantial establishment, originally conceived and built, we
fancied, as a dower house for the Tudor manor built in the grounds of the decommissioned
Charterhouse (Carthusian priory) just across the A36 main road which skirted the property.
The devolved Homewood estate had itself been divided in recent years and a sizeable parcel
of land sold, presumably providing funds to meet death duties devolving upon the family who
then occupied Homewood, that of a Major Davey. The Major and his wife, it transpired, had died
within a few weeks of each other. The death duties must have been crippling. In microcosm, the
history of this particular piece of land was the story of our greater land, England, great lands and
estates borne of feudal power and primogeniture having been repeatedly sub-divided as other
powers rose and taxes hit home so that now we can each and all of us be a little feudal with our
own eighth-of-an-acre estates. And I’m not knocking it!
Ed was in a lather of intent. Homewood became something he had to have. The mere sight
of it had kindled a powerful force within him which bore on both his Polish and Scottish
heritages. I don’t think he had ever before even thought that something like Homewood could be
his. It was the ultimate possession in a line of possession which had begun with his first child’s
collection. The force of desire was deeply atavistic and I think I knew a little about it because I
shared it, for a while.
My own passion ran something like this … There seemed to me the promise that I might
discover, at least identify, the essence of Englishness in being a part of that place, that there was
something in the custodianship, however temporary or short-lived, which would reveal in my
soul the life force which I thought flowed through my own nationality, something which an
intimate association and deep involvement with the land itself would impart to me, like the hand
that had risen from the lake to pass the sword to Arthur. I too was searching for the knowledge,
that certainty that I too belonged, that I might belong.
Lately, in 2005, we who even recognise such phenomena discuss the disassociation of
modern people with the land as a topic almost as important as the sovereignty of the land itself.
The name of the land almost doesn’t matter, Europe, England, Britain … But however
Europeanised, even world-ised, our children no longer know the names of trees and flowers as
we did; they are not free to roam the land and know the haunts of birds and where the best
blackberries grow and where to hide when the call comes to return home, always too early, at the
end of a day’s roaming. Englishness grew from digging deep in the land over centuries, of
washing its dirt from beneath one’s fingernails over many years; from walking its tracks and
byways to market from market; from attending its churches over a lifetime; from burying its
dead in the same soil that provides the bread and from washing its newborn in water sprung from
its very heart.
A definition of ‘belonging’ to the land cannot possibly come from a book or a packet, even a
shop and certainly not from an internet website. The definition of belonging can only ever be
written by ourselves, with the ink that only memories manufacture. The words of A.N Other can
only be but irrelevant. Without physical definition, the concept of nationality has no meaning.
Without the land, we are mere shadows on the green and the brown. There is something that an
eighth of an acre does to the soul, for despite ‘gro-bags’ and hydroponics and fancy fertilisers
made from chopped newsprint and plasticised moisture granules, roots grow best in Mother
Nature’s ground. I’m not a believer in the current notion that gardens can be found on roof tops
or that, as gardens are only spaces, they can be made anywhere.
I declared earlier in these volumes that being gay would always surpass being English in any
chart of the fundaments of my character but in a sprint, the result would be a close-run outcome.
I’ve always queried this recent media rash of headline-grabbing articles about ‘tests’ of
Englishness - and, presumably Frenchness or Indian-ness - which always run in the vein of
which visiting cricket or football team an immigrant into this country would, or even should,
support. For me, that has nothing to do with Englishness. For me my Englishness is very simple,
as proof positive as Indian-ness would be of India or Frenchness of France. It is this: if even the
thought of the land itself brings tears to your eyes and an ache to your heart, that’s proof enough.
Just the thought of the Malvern Hills or the Downs at Beachy Head or Friston Churchyard or
those few blue-remembered rolling combes and downs of Somerset reduces me to tears.
I know a certain place in England
Where, upon midsummer’s day,
The light that bathes the shire at sunrise
Simply takes your breath away.

So, at last, after all my sulks and strops, I thrilled to the depths of my being when Ed
announced that by hook or by crook he was going to live at Homewood. However, to realise the
dream he had to buy it and thus he had to find sixty-eight thousand pounds, a lot of money in
1977.
Needless to say, the ‘by hook or by crook’ method worked and he scraped together the
money and in November 1977, having left Jan with my parents in Malvern on the way down
from Scotland, we moved in. Other than in photographs, Ed’s mother hadn’t even seen her new
home as yet and we had thought she would prefer to see the removed old one unpacked and in
situ rather than still in Shore Porters’ tea chests. Over the next four months, I lost count of how
many furniture vans were ultimately required to move us.
If Jan was in some doubt as to where she was being taken, I wonder now, writing in 2005,
what I was expecting when I arrived with Ed on Monday 31st October 1977 at our new home at
the top of the hill overlooking Freshford, which was the epitome of the English village, gentle,
conservative and grounded in centuries of sleepy ordinariness. After all, we were moving not
into a cottage on Freshford High Street at the bottom of the hill but into one of ‘the big houses’
and even to ourselves, we were hardly big house material.
First off, we were two men. In the neighbourhood, only one man even to my later
knowledge lived, unmarried, in a very grand house on the road linking us to Hinton Charterhouse
but I think he had a mother or at least a well-known reason, perhaps of pedigree or generations of
residence, to be a man living alone. As to other ‘gays in the village’, I’m pretty sure that Ed and I
were going to be at least the only two ‘out’ ones. What a frightful shock for the inhabitants, I
thought, to wake up one morning and find themselves besieged by the forces of Sodom. They
must have had such expectations, I imagined. Not wishing to impugn them, but Mr and Mrs
Gilroy might easily have noised abroad some of their initial observations about the buyers of
their house. Having said that, I had to question how observant such people as the Gilroys were
after Fiona Gilroy enquired of Ed whether his mother was titled Mrs Murray or Lady Murray. I
didn’t realise how much of an aristocratic air Ed obviously exuded. I would have thought very
little, but all that was before I learned that people are seldom what they seem. Other than Joseph
Lockwood, the head of EMI, I don’t think I’d ever met a Sir or a Lady at that time.
So what the reaction to our arrival would be was a question which occupied me rather than
Ed who gave the situation not a moment’s concern. My memories of growing up in a small town
were such that I felt that I could at least talk sensibly to neighbours about basic country matters
such as gardens and the weather and the occasional dog although ranked in my disfavour was
that I wasn’t a church-goer, that by reasons of gender I’d be denied the Womens Institute and
would patently never be joining the cricket team. But changing times had forced me to doubt that
one could still leave the back door open as we used to do or that there was a milkman who called
or a paperboy or even that there was a functioning village shop or post office and in the event, I
was right.
I knew we had neighbours, the Tippets at the bottom of the park and the Luxmoores next
door on the main road as well as Fred Curtis and his wife who had once been part of the Davey’s
staff when ‘the big house’ functioned as such. Although I could not possibly have known the
nuts and bolts of the machinery of contemporary village life, I imagined a future as some kind of
time warp, veiled in a sort of mystical bucolic fairy-ness, through which Ed and I would waft
like two bachelor knights at Camelot and where, when not being gracious and seigneurial, I
would cloister myself in my study in winter or on a shaded terrace in summer and write the novel
that would be my fame and my fortune. All such a lot of blah and bling really except perhaps for
the last part. I had proved that I could finish a novel and armed with that confidence, I had
started a third, entitled DEAD AND FALLEN HORSES, a dynastic story based on the Murrays
of Dundee, beginning with the saga of James Murray, junior reporter, climbing out onto the
wrecked span of the first Tay rail bridge and realising that a whole passenger train, locomotive
and carriages, had plunged into the stormy waters below, causing the deaths of dozens of people.
These were some of my dreamy, ditzy thoughts as we arrived at Homewood to await the
removal vans, after which we had to awake from these dreams in rather a hurry and re-focus
sharply and immediately. It wasn’t as though we hadn’t been warned. My father had seen the
place and given it the benefit of his builder’s eye. Though he had pronounced himself impressed,
he had of course, I began to remember, mentioned the upkeep. Upkeep? Surely, this was
Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land? Didn’t God do the upkeep? Other friends too, as
gently as possible, had implied that Homewood was a little big.
I suppose ‘blithe’ is about the best adjective to describe my approach to my life, then. I
suppose now that stubborn, rebellious and contrary were others. But, in the repetitive
conversations I had with myself at the time, I reminded that other me that the Playhouse season
in Edinburgh had worked, hadn’t it? How much more impossible than Homewood had that
seemed at the outset? We’d managed to get bums on the seats on the set of INTERNATIONAL
VELVET hadn’t we when we had been set to fail? Then, failure, either in concept or reality,
didn’t come into my life, at all.
I was, however, about to make its acquaintance.
Of course, I was only thirty, Ed was but a few years older than me and in those days,
hindsight makes me think that one’s energy was so limitless and one’s enthusiasm so boundless
that both compensated for the difficulties in the prospect ahead like anaesthetic before a major
surgery. Thus insulated by bravado and arrogance, we were neither of us daunted as we walked
the perimeter of the six acres of paddocks which would need mowing. Nor were either of us
cowed by the considerable woodland encompassed by the estate which would need managing,
the individual trees in the garden which required pollarding, pruning and – yes – even pleaching.
Oh, look it up!
Neither of us had any doubts about the massive herbaceous borders which would need
weeding and planning, culling and restocking or the ten-feet tall beech hedges which would need
trimming and shaping or the two vast greenhouses in the walled garden which would need re-
earthing and painting and a massive amount of conservation and re-glazing or the several
substantial outbuildings and the huge kitchen garden which would need maintenance and
cultivation respectively or the summerhouse and the tennis house which were gasping for a coat
of paint or the drive which would need edging and weeding or the house with its seven
bedrooms, five bathrooms, attic apartment, two staircases, three drawing rooms, two studies,
scullery, walk-in larder, the main kitchen, the servants’ hall or … Hang on a moment, buster …
What servants? Which gardeners and who housemaid and what cleaner and whence cometh
they?
Answer came there none because the question was never raised.
Why? Because neither had we been daunted whilst we had spent the previous two weeks
packing up every single thing in both Ed’s apartment and his shop, wrapping every item of china,
glass, wood, metal, horlogerie, gesso, papier mache, marquetry, terra cotta, paintings, prints and
carpets and rugs … Thirty years later, even the thought of the effort required is sufficient to send
me back to bed. The prospect of maintaining a comparatively tiny garden in the middle of
London only one hundred and twenty feet by twenty is exhausting not to mention another
garden, an acre of Sussex downland. I hardly recognise the young man I am now writing about.
He is as strange to me as a Martian would have been.
However, in those days, anything was possible. The mere thought was both father and
mother to the deed. We made things happen. We were blissfully ignorant not only of the dangers
and pitfalls inherent in the project but thankfully we were blissfully ignorant of ourselves. But
why? Really, why?
Because, I think, there was no going back. It was all too late.
 Chapter Five

“Darling, Winter’s finally arrived and your

mother’s old blue tits are back again…”
A grandmother writing to her grandson.

Having written thus far, I have realised that when any saga, especially an intimate, personal
relationship, has an unhappy ending, it is initially difficult if not impossible to recount the
beginning of the affair without the jaundice of hindsight. Thus, and in that light, it’s hard for me
to properly recall let alone accurately recount the magical quality which the house and the
gardens at Homewood radiated even on that very first wet and muddy day. I felt as though the
house wanted us there. I felt enlivened by its very location, embraced by the ambience and
encouraged by its spirit, one which I had contrived and which lived within the walls and the earth
that surrounded it. Although the nature of the people living in the house had changed, that of the
house never did in the short time I lived there.
From the start, I became quickly convinced that Homewood had been built on a site which
had been host to human habitation for centuries. There were even ancient standing stones -
megaliths, the remains of dolmen even - which had been incorporated in the perimeter wall.
Indeed, the very nature of the ground with its commanding topographic position breathed
history. The basement cellar beneath the main house and the huge water cistern which had been
built beneath the kitchen and a further one beneath the kitchen garden both spoke of much earlier
construction around and over which earth had been subsequently banked. I don’t know what I
felt but the feeling took the form of a comforting, protective presence reaching out from the past,
a collective humanity whose voice I understood to be imparting a consoling message of the ‘ Che
sera, sera’ variety, sort of, ‘Nothing you can do, buddy so best go with the flow and get on with it
…’
 Homewood’s Front Door
It was the best attitude with which to embark upon this next part of my life, for I was so
helplessly in the hands of others that to have even imagined that I was beating my own path
would have been folly. I suppose that I’d spent so many years being the one ‘in charge’, the one
who made things happen, advising others what they should do that I now wanted to merely be
carried, to be treated, as my future mother-in-law Marion Quiney would say in old age, ‘like a
parcel, darling’.
Perhaps that’s why, in the end, both the circumstances and the place were so easily left
because all that I invested was my labour. All I had achieved was some passing maintenance. I
had neither added nor subtracted one scrap of substance. There was nothing of me to be left
behind. Even the reshaping of the gardens was only temporary, a work that time and new owners
would or could soon erase. My parcel would, in due course of time, be dumped in my own lap as
‘undeliverable’, ‘Not known at this address’.
I have already recorded elsewhere, in the ROCKY HORROR book I wrote some years ago
with Scott Michaels that our friend Tim Curry was our first visitor at Homewood and that he
arrived at the end of the first day. I cannot help but think, robbed of the joy of happy, rose-tinted
hindsight, that Tim had as much a crush on Ed as he had on the house although being a part of
such a fabulous enterprise must also have had its attraction for someone who didn’t yet even own
his own place despite three years of what amounted to international stardom and not
inconsiderable earnings. But I was very, very pleased and fulfilled to see him.
I remember endless rain for the first couple of days as we unpacked the tea chests and took
each emptied one to be stacked in the coach house across the yard. Because none of the doors
were closed during that time, there was a dampness inside the house which made for a sort of
outside-inside atmosphere not unlike a film location. I suppose we managed to find sheets and
blankets for that first night and we slept the sleep of the just.
Before I slept, I remember hearing Ed playing his beautiful Edwardian inlaid satinwood
grand piano which had been finally installed in the drawing room downstairs. He was a self-
taught pianist as indeed he was a self-taught man but although I might have found him lacking in
the qualities due the latter, as the former he played his impromptu jazz versions of classics and
old favourites sensitively and passionately. Although the piano had not yet been tuned, the sound
that Ed coaxed from it was glorious. The house, as yet carpet-less, metamorphosed into a giant
musical box and hearing Ed’s melodies added to the magic I had been experiencing all day.
We rose with early dawn excitement the following morning to continue to ‘dress the set’.
Having Tim there only emphasised the unreality and I felt that in this country guise, he was in
fact giving a sort of performance, albeit a private one for himself but nevertheless one against
which he could set his other ‘real’ career. Making a career out of pretending to be someone else
has never excluded in my mind the inescapable thought that perpetual and self-perpetuating
pretence is the fundament of an actor’s life. However, I cannot deny the glamour which Tim
trailed into the house with him when he arrived that first day and to remember it, let alone sense
it in the first place, I must have been still just as addicted to celebrity and ‘the business’ as I was
on the day I had banished myself only fifteen short months earlier.
But to work, of course, not only to live, we had to eat. When I knew him, Ed rarely cooked
and shied rather on the parsimonious side of grocery shopping. The resulting restricted budget
coupled with my own ignorance came together on one gloriously mythic altar called the Aga.
This huge, Swedish invention for cooking food, cast in solid steel and never turned off, had been
a tool of the servants in British households for years before. After the second world war and
totally servant-less, the mem sahibs of the outer shires and counties had to turn their hand to
making meals themselves and Agas became, perhaps not entirely en train, smaller, coloured red
and of other colours than the standard cream. Over the years they became VERY fashionable and
were duly modernised to run on contemporary fuels, cleaner than the coke and anthracite of yore.
Many a pretty novelist has tapped or scrawled out their first oeuvres warmed at the kitchen table
by the comforting radiance of an Aga. Hence, the Aga saga …
 Middle class housewives and their long suffering husbands had cheered as one when clean
gas-fuelled cooking stoves appeared on the market and had long been thrilled at the
disappearance of the old kitchen ranges, small or large. Women of higher than middle class
didn’t have to cook and therefore didn’t understand the cheering. They cottoned on, however,
with practical celerity. Solid fuel stoves needed solid fuel, kept in easily manipulated storage
containers small enough for a housewife of any class to empty the fuel into the stove to keep the
live flames alight in the firebox which had to be riddled, by the long suffering husbands, every
day to remove the ashes and re-lit, often several times a week, when the flames went out. A more
dirty and laborious and lengthy chore did not exist. Well, perhaps gutter-clearing and pond-
dredging came pretty close but these didn’t need to be attended to twice a day.
Finally, I had my own turn, faced with our own fiery beast which when we arrived was oil-
fired although this method was soon changed to gas. The interregnum between the rules of oil
and gas left the house horribly cold and empty, as though the very heart of it had been
extinguished to herald a new ice age. It was like the withdrawal of love. Ed had a word to
describe the atmosphere. ‘Snell’, he called it. It means ‘cold’ in auld Scots parlance, apparently.
Onomatopoeic, at least and the coming winter was to so prove.
But back to the nitty gritty … The thickly enamelled stove top of the Aga displays two
heavy steel hobs, each covered by a heavily insulated hinged cover, raised for cooking, lowered
when not in use. Cooking is done in thick-bottomed steel or heavy aluminium pans as the
transfer of heat from the hob is achieved by contact. How many good thin-bottomed pans have
suffered and how many sauces ruined will never be known from being left too long. Anything
extraneous on the hobs – burned ash, residual spillage - which reduces the contact will increase
the cooking time. The variation in heat needed in cooking is achieved by moving the pan from
the centre to the outside of the hob where the heat is less and in the oven by moving the food up
or down the shelves within the oven on the basis that the bottom of an oven is cooler than the top
because heat rises. There are, usually, two hobs, one hotter than the other, and two ovens, one
hotter than the other. There. How to cook on an Aga. Mary Berry charges seventy-five pounds a
day for Aga virgins to learn how.
Food tastes different cooked on an Aga as I quickly discovered. It means that perfectly dull
work-a-day recipes can, on an Aga, be made to taste ‘special’. Toast, which is made between two
round criss-cross wire paddles and inserted on the hob beneath the lowered cover, tastes as
though it had been made by a country baker. Potato dishes baked in the oven to a golden crisp,
taste as though they had been made for a Sandringham shooting party. And stuffed roast breast
of lamb, an old staple of ours in the early Putney days, was once again resurrected not only
because it was the cheapest recipe one could effect with meat other than turning cannibal but
because it roasted beautifully, as never before. Though we had a back-up gas stove, this was only
used in the height of summer, when the Aga was extinguished, and by Ed’s mother to boil milk
for her morning coffee. In no time, I had developed a passion for cooking and became
progressively quite good and inventive at it, so much so that this unexpectedly acquired skill was
put to good use later … But, later.
In my daily journal I recorded all the dishes we ever enjoyed in that blessed accursed place
and here are some of them, covering the first few days during which I harvested the remains of
the Gilroy’s 1977 vegetable planting. Should this litany prove tedious, skip it … Personally, it
makes my mouth water.
 Roast rib of beef, baked potatoes;
Homewood’s leeks au gratin, steak and kidney pie and our own hedgerows’ blackberry pie
and cream with stilton cheese;
Cream of Homewood’s carrots soup and curried garlic toast, roast lamb, roast potatoes and
Homewood’s cabbage;
Curried cream of carrot soup, stuffed Homewood’s marrow, boiled potatoes, Homewood’s
cabbage and frozen peas;
Marrow soup with tomatoes and parsley, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding;
Chicken casserole and bread and butter pudding;
Sunday Lunch with Clodagh and Jason Wallace, Tim Curry and my sister Elizabeth was
carrot and mint soup, roast turkey with fresh thyme stuffing, roast potatoes and Homewood’s
Brussels sprouts and apple crumble made with red wine; that evening we ate cold turkey with
fried and then crisped, oven-roasted bubble and squeak;
Roast lamb, Homewood’s mint sauce, roast potatoes, carrots and creamed Homewood’s
cauliflower;
Turkey fricassee with tomatoes, onions, garlic and red wine …
And, of course, I had lost no time in making my own bread which, with an Aga, was easy-
peasy personified. I remember feeling incredibly empowered when that first loaf came out of the
oven, as though I was clutching the very staff of life. Reviewing the list above, I can hardly
believe that I was its author. The golden years fade fastest …
The kitchen window looked out onto a yard which itself gave onto the walled kitchen garden
and despite the cosiness within, something had to be done with the beds and patches. The first
Somerset earth that I attended on and prepared bordered a bisecting path through the kitchen
garden and along the path’s edge I was to plant garlic corms as I had read that this could be the
first planting job of the New Year. Then, as February wore into March which trickled into April,
the existing herbs would be culled and refreshed. The whole kitchen garden had to be re-
cultivated and this started by digging, row upon row after row after row. Very heavy, tiring work
and wonderful for concentrating the mind. The very monotony is balm to an overactive brain.
When Tim Curry came to stay, which was frequently, he too would help dig. Ed found the
activity more soothing than the fretting which resulted when he approached the subject of ‘the
business’ for in that first few months, any thoughts of selling antiques had disappeared from his
mind’s screen like yesterday’s weather forecast.
It was obvious that no one was going to be sought to help us, either inside or outside the
house and although I never begrudged my labour or my application or the unrewarded help
generously given by my father who physically assisted Ed with dozens of building and practical
jobs large and small before elements of resentment began to creep into all our relationships.
The arrival of Jan Murray on the tenth of November a couple of weeks after we had moved
in laid another colour of grey onto the wintry skyline. Remembering Mother Murray’s arrival
goads me into an admission of an important omission in these pages and in the latter pages of
APPOINTMENTS WITH THE DREAM FAIRY. I have made no mention of my cat, Rufus. The
name Rufus of course has red connotations and so why I called a female black cat by a red male
name I have forgotten although she did have the most wonderful henna-sheen to her coat which
was all-but entirely black save three or four white hairs beneath her chinny-chin-chin. Rufus had
been one of a brood of kittens which had been born whilst David Minns and I were living in
Montserrat Road, Putney. I had been told of the mother cat and her sister which belonged to the
actor and comedian Hugh Paddick. Hugh’s Oriental boyfriend had been loathe to accommodate
his thespian mate’s pets into their new life together and there were no buts to be brooked. The
cats’ future was, apparently, either a life in Putney or the great beyond, for the nasty Fu Manchu
boyfriend had stamped his pretty foot and, as ran my silly conceit, I fancied the great beyond
might even have been terminal and located in the backyard of a local Chinese Restaurant. Even
imagined in the parlare which Paddick made famous with Kenneth Williams in the radio series
ROUND THE HORNE, varda the bona kitty was too horrible to contemplate.
So, the cats came to live in Putney and, un-spayed and with the luxury of their own garden
open to the elements and the local toms, they soon became pregnant and both produced. Two
populous litters. The resulting chaos impelled me to find homes for the original pair and all the
offspring except … The little black jobbie. And so this tiny but perfect creature came with us
from Montserrat Road to Werter Road and enjoyed a tolerable though somewhat push-me-pull-
you existence as she was boarded out with friends and parents when circumstances and our
absences from the flat demanded. She was especially fond of Freddie when he had entered our
lives and he in turn adored her as he adored anything feline and furry.
But, despite the time Rufus spent by herself, she always seemed pleased to see me and none
more so when she arrived with Jan on Thursday 10th November, probably very glad not to be
boarding any longer with my long-suffering parents in Malvern. Happily, Rufus loved living in
the country and took to it as, to maul a pun, to the manor born. She stalked and preyed and
pounced and preened and purred and, what was most significant, became best and inseparable
friends with Jan, upon whose ample and comfortable lap she spent every sleeping moment she
could. Two solitary displaced souls, perhaps, but in fact each was all the other needed and as the
truth of our new situation was that we all knew as few people as we had known in Edinburgh,
any company was company.
The remainder of that year of 1977 was so taken up with gardening, cooking, planning,
cleaning and emptying both Ed’s Edinburgh flat and my London flat of our remaining
possessions and fitments before instructing Frank Caldwell of Harbottle and Lewis to handle the
sales that I can remember little of much event except for comings and goings. QUEEN went on
tour in America, beginning that year on the 11th November in Portland, Oregon. In those days
we could still send telegrams and we duly wished Freddie well. Minns left England and went to
join his faraway lover. Tim was soon to follow as, in his search for a producer with whom to
work on his first record album for A and M records, he was getting into bed, creatively, with Bob
Ezrin in New York.
But, people still came to see us and thus we saw people … Clodagh Wallace’s friend Sarah
Cape, the co-owner of Models One, the fabled Bond Street Model agency came with her friend,
the polo-playing Jilly Graham. Caroline and Robert Lee arrived at the same time as Murray Head
and his wife Sue and we had a jokey weekend when Ed brought forth the box which contained
his tightly packed stash of jewellery. I can still hear those sharp intakes of breath as the sparklers
sparkled appropriately and magnificently and the ladies tried on the various pieces!
My office assistant from John Reid Enterprises, John Brown came for a weekend with his
girlfriend Julia Wooley whose father, in Bath, through this meeting became our dentist. It was to
be a time before John too followed his father, Sir John, into publishing although what Sir John
thought of his son’s VIZ magazine and subsequent publishing empire, I would have given a
king’s ransom to know. I should imagine from this very civilised man that pride was not only at
the top of the list but all the way through the edifice. The Ardens, momma, poppa and Sharon,
were due for afternoon tea one day but poppa Don’s roller (Rolls Royce) expired on the M4. In
those days, I still had the massive diamond ear stud that Sharon had given me and I took it out of
my ear that afternoon with great disappointment before returning it to its little red leather box to
await another occasion.
My parents arrived, of course and arrived and arrived. Mother loved Homewood as indeed I
felt that my father did too. It didn’t take long for mother to start to organise. Oh, Lord! My
mother’s propensity for causing, making and playing ‘scenes’ is legendary in our family and
unfortunately, her reprehensible sulks and stamps were experienced by most of my friends in the
course of my time at Homewood. Golly, sulks and stamps … I learned how to affect my own at
her practised knee.
Sara Randall was also a welcome visitor too and not a week or two later, after an age of
waiting, called me to say that she liked what she had read of my novel and that I should
persevere. Oh, right. Yes. But HOW to persevere?
And, at last it seemed, one of Ed’s best customers, the Australian Peter Quigley came to call
although the pressure from Ed’s corner on Ed to make sales was at best, on a scale of ten, nearer
a three than a nine. But we had at last sold something and, ergo, to my small mind and cramped
perspectives, Ed’s experiment was working. England Antiques also came and went and bought.
Not a lot, but something … I would imagine, trying to put myself in their shoes, that these buyers
must have been somewhat put off plucking pieces from what even at that early stage was looking
like a solidly established country house of, and filled with, incredible beauty. Buying in such a
context, to me, would have not been dissimilar to ransacking one’s granny’s drawing room and
selling her favourite chair whilst she was still sitting in it.
That these buyers were no more than incidentally encouraged didn’t help the sales ledger. I
began to realise that Ed didn’t actually WANT to sell anything, a feeling he later confirmed
when we were finally clearing some of the last of the stock from the shop premises in Edinburgh
where, exhausted and thoroughly de-motivated, he admitted that he didn’t even want to be a
dealer anymore, leastways not in the way his business had accidentally developed. I
acknowledged him and of course started wondering what on earth I was therefore going to do to
earn a crust myself …
The local people we went to see were significantly our neighbours, Brian and Margie
Tippets and their delightful family who lived across Priory Lane at the bottom of the property.
They gave a party to introduce us to the local county and I fancied we behaved as specimens
should on that glass-of-wine slide beneath the unforgiving lens of the social microscope. The
Luxmoores, our neighbours on the other side, also pitched in with a drinks party. But mostly we
saw people in and from London.
Life was becoming very small, pegged to a grass green plot of paradise in Somerset but
dependent on being watered by that tarmac tributary of the Thames known as the M4. We
therefore saw more of Bryan and Nanette as well as Tim Curry, who had bought a VERY
expensive flat in Fulham. And, perhaps surprisingly, we also saw my old boss and still friend, I
thought, John Reid who had just taken up with another young man called Andy who would
figure, I figured, but a short time in the quartier raffine which was Montpellier Square. It was
there, that afternoon in late December 1977, I spoke to Elton for the last time for several years.
 “I’d love to SEE you,” I squeaked as Reid handed me the ‘phone. “Oh, I’m sure we’ll bump
into each other sometime,” came the nasally delivered, non-committal reply. It was the moment
that I realised that no one leaves Elton only to re-appear for the purposes of mere friendship and
as far as he saw the situation, I had left. His amputated, disinterested rebuttal hurt me deeply.
Ouch. I think my memory is too long. As the architect of the video for DON’T GO BREAKING
MY HEART as well as his first and thunderously successful solo concert at The Edinburgh
Festival and the supervisor of that incredibly successful British tour in 1976, I fancied I deserved
if not the friendship I had thought had existed, then at least a mite more courtesy. I smarted even
more when I reminded myself of his having conspired to have my every likeness eliminated from
the photographs in David Nutter’s book of that same tour.
That sort of vindictiveness only oozes from the most poisonous mind and so I suppose I
ought to have been glad to be shot of the corpse of what was once a friendship before it really
began to stink. How different the two stars in my recent firmament were, Elton and Freddie.
Elton couldn’t wait to get rid of past baggage; Freddie found the process of divorce
excruciatingly painful, as we were about to discover.
I’m not sure how well the QUEEN tour of America went as far as Minns and Freddie were
concerned in their personal development. There had already been distressing gossip in London
concerning Freddie Mercury and a certain Peter Place, an antique dealer in Walton Street dealing
in brass. However, Peter Place apart, when David returned to England I fancied that the signs
were all pointing to the precipice. At the time I was rather annoyed that the Mercury/Minns affair
seemed doomed to have had such short legs and was so unfit and out of breath. I had counted on
a longer run … But I notice from my journal that at Christmas 1977, Minns gave his lover a
beautifully jewelled and enamelled brooch in the form of a crown and Freddie stumped up a nice
Cartier watch. So, ‘Deck them balls with fouls and lolly …’
But by the end of the week after Christmas, David had called with news that he suspected
that Freddie had indeed found another love and it wasn’t an antique dealer from London. From
the initial suspicion, the revelations progressed apace and by the fourth of the New Year, Freddie
had confessed that he had indeed met someone else and the ‘someone else’ was called Joe
although in the same breath he declared that on no account did he want to lose David. It was a
wriggling plea that I was to hear several times again from our in-house maestro. By the ninth of
January, David was informed that said Joe was being flown to England from east coast USA. Joe
had a surname by now. Fanelli.
This was not a good time for David. He not only worked for Freddie’s company Goose
Productions but also lived in a flat whose rent was secured by Freddie. As I put down the
receiver to a sobbing, utterly distraught David, the phone immediately rang again and there was
Freddie, asking me if I could DO anything? Like, dear, what? He was fulsome in his
explanations of what had happened to him, so fulsome in fact that I felt he was trying to
exculpate himself. He hated partings and, in truth, didn’t want a parting from David at this point
although how David was supposed to cope with the lover-in-waiting, I have never discovered.
Obviously, no one can be ‘blamed’ in affairs of the heart, only, I reminded my dear rock-star
friend, in the way those affairs are conducted!
Two of my most important male friends had appeared to have fallen out of love and thus I
had been pitched onto the horns of another age-old dilemma, I had no wish to lose either friend
and assured Freddie that he would be welcome in any home of mine with whomsoever and that I
would weather whatever fall-out emanated from an exploding David. By the end of the month
and when Joe Fanelli had temporarily returned to America, Freddie was lonely and was once
again back with David, weeping and whingeing and feeling hard-done by as his love-life by
definition threatened to alienate all his old touchstones such as David and Mary. Yes, I thought
as I too was regaled with tales of woe, life is indeed no pleasure cruise, is it, dear? Friends often
overstretch their welcome on the shoulder which selfish tears have made too wet for comfort …
But the bonds between David and Freddie ran deep and the beginning of February saw
Freddie throwing a birthday party for David at Shezam, his favourite Indian restaurant in Cheval
Place in Knightsbridge by which time Joe Fanelli had returned to the maestro’s bed. And, of
course, Mary made three. I know, I know … Madness. What were the lyrics of that Bobby Vee
song about a rubber ball? ‘Rubber ball, I come bouncin’ back to you, rubber ball …’ But, as I
wrote that night:
“… So, ‘the family’ gathered for another birthday. One day, it will gather for
the first funeral. I wonder whose it will be? There’s bound to be a party
afterwards. It’s the way of families …”
David returned with us to Homewood but was not to be left alone. Freddie arrived at
Homewood in the evening of the following Sunday with his chauffeur, Derek Balcombe, stayed
for dinner and returned to London with David afterwards. Mercury’s emotionally propelled
glitches had never been mere one-offs and this one was running true to form. This was indeed
serial madness.
To end my topsy-turvy year, from that same journal, I note one very important personal
development. On Thursday 1st December there is an entry:
“… Brought the novel downstairs.”
On Monday 5th, there is another entry:
“… started writing again. Actually, started re-reading the old stuff … God,
it’s wordy!” Had I been truly psychic, I would have heard several voices agreeing, words of
the variety:
“We know, dear. It’s the story of your life!”
And in conclusion to all these grand operatic themes, Ed and I had decided to change the
name of our beloved home to something that sounded a little grander. We added Park to
Homewood to make Homewood Park and, as though to validate the bragadoccio, duly ordered
appropriate stationery which David Costa, my old friend from Rocket Records, agreed to design
for us. I have a nagging doubt that Ed never paid him. Sorry, Costa.
 Chapter Six

When all’s been said and all’s been done

A couple’s more than one plus one
Much more than just a tidy sum
And scars of battles lost and won …

In the Spring, a young man’s fancy’s said by Tennyson to lightly turn …

I love spring. I love each of the seasons, of course, but the spring is such a marvellous tease,
the most intimate of all. Little buds, tantalising intimations of what is to come, begin to appear
way before they are kick-started by the gene-genie into the phenomenon of growth. But the
knowledge that the buds will grow breeds hope, which in turn breeds the ability to endure.
Human beings can endure much more than they think and there was to be a lot of endurance to
be weathered that year before Spring was well and truly sprung. And then, of course, much less
romantic and far more urgent is that certain sap which starts to rise in spring. It rises and rises
and there’s not a damn thing any man can do about it … I’ve never been any good at tying knots
in anything.
1978 had, on paper - mine - started well. The finished cut of INTERNATIONAL VELVET
was successfully screened at Pinewood Studios on the thirtieth of January and a Royal Premiere
had been promised for Bryan’s movie in London and a special premiere in Washington, the
home of the US Equestrian Team’s headquarters. I was very pleased to meet up with the cast and
crew again and especially pleased to rekindle a friendship with Keith Wilson, Bryan’s art
director and his partner Ian who came several times to Homewood and who were great guests. I
have sadly lost touch with them but often think of them fondly and hope that their partnership
made it through the vicissitudes of both the perils of its own existence and more significantly
Aids’ savage cull in the nineteen-eighties. I had the impression that they too were beginning – or
at least wanted to – explore life after passion. In those days, couples like Ed and I, or rather our
modi vivendi et operandi, were rare. For most of our ilk, monogamist sexual fidelity was the
yardstick of a ‘successful’ gay relationship as indeed it was of its hetero counterpart. The idea
that there was a generic difference in relationships between straights and gays had not yet
emerged. Most who ‘played away’ didn’t talk about it.
The much-anticipated spring proved a long time in the coming. However greedily I
devoured the arrival of anything green in the garden, I had to remain content, florally speaking,
with the hellebores and the winter jasmine, the mahonia and the daphnia which, although
exotically evocative reminded me not of rumbustious gambolling of newborn lambs amongst
cowslips but the quiet, less passionate atmospheres of the interiors of shops like Crabtree and
Evelyn and the more Marple-ish perfume counters of provincial department stores. Rather than
inculcating a little inner peace, working in and walking around Homewood’s garden made me
incredibly impatient and, conveniently, left me little time to settle to writing. I thought, of course,
that I was Wonderman, that I could attempt, and succeed at, everything. However, the winter at
Homewood had taught me that to be able to write, there has to be an unassailable area in one’s
life, like a permanently empty room, into which one can duck at will. Wanting to and yet being
unable to, knowing that one should and yet finding any excuse not to is, I suppose, what is called
‘writer’s block’.

Homewood And Its Lawns

But there were diversions a-plenty. My friendship with Sarah Forbes provided a lot of the
cutting-edge passion which my own life lacked and as we corresponded or at least telephoned
most days, there was a lot of passion. We must have appeared a strange acquaintance, bearing
our vehement souls to each other, revealing our joys and our woes in equal measure for she was
indeed taking the brunt of the knocks that fledging from the family nest can often deal. At the
time, I wrote down the following – whether it be mine or another’s reflection, I know not:
“The greatest grief of the ages is the conflict between the generations …”
Sarah, whilst making her way in London, had all the advantages and yet all the
disadvantages of being her parents’ daughter and as I had the confidence of both sides of the
parent-child divide, I began to begin to understand this almost tectonic inter-generational
attrition. Sarah was rebelling. Bryan and Nanette, conscious of their status and sensitive to the
reactions of others as well as being supremely concerned with their daughter’s well-being and
best interests, weathered some stormy moments. However, the stormiest were still to come and
were such that even I would not have foreseen, not even after Sarah’s own summer of love in
Edinburgh in 1976.
Becalmed in the dog-days of winter, one small highlight had been the unannounced
appearance one afternoon of a Mr and Mrs MacArthur-Reynolds, from Lymington in Hampshire,
bearing information about Homewood. I had become deeply interested in the house and its
pedigree, visiting local antiquarian bookshops and libraries in Frome, Bath and Warminster to try
to pin down who, when and why. This unheralded piece of the jigsaw ran as follows; Mrs M-R’s
mother had been born here in 1887, the daughter of one John Roberts who had been the first
owner of Homewood independent of the family who lived in the Charterhouse Priory. They
promised to return with pictures and a painting of Homewood’s house which they were
bequeathed.
This most gracious of English couples later sent a copy of a photograph of the house as it
had existed in the eighteen-nineties with a wing standing where the new drawing room and
dining rooms stand. My interest in Homewood’s history was reinvigorated and when the village
formed a History Society which met every so often in the hall at the bottom of the Tippets’ hill, I
was in regular attendance. I also received a lot of help from a gentleman by the name of Fletcher
at Trinity College who provided valuable help drawn from his researches at Hinton Charterhouse
Priory. Others more immediate who were of help and interest regarding the more recent history
of the house were Fred Curtis’s wife and another local resident, Mrs Mitchell, who lived in
neighbouring Pipehouse Lane, both of whom had been either house or kitchen maids in the time
of Major and Mrs Davey.
The arrival of houseguests and visitors both expected and unannounced remained constant
and I began to learn the art of using what was in the fridge and the larder to produce meals which
were not necessarily of the highest culinary standard but comparative triumphs of re-cycling and
presentation. I admit that the house itself helped me … anyone who had come down the drive to
a lunch of bread and cheese and pickles and soup and who sat down at the antique table and ate
off Chamberlain’s Worcester porcelain was at least initially impressed and I worked hard
creating an atmosphere of what I can only describe as throwaway chic as we still had no finished
dining room in which to entertain. So one evening, I laid a feast fit for a queen who I hoped
would not feel insulted by having to eat it in the old servants’ kitchen.
There were in fact to be two arriving queens, one of whom was a most welcome frequent
visitor, namely Sara Randall, my old friend with whom I had worked at Barry Krost’s office and
who, since establishing her own Saraband agency had acquired some notable clients, one of the
most significant being the actress Pat Phoenix, most hailed for her portrayal of Elsie Tanner in
Tony Warren’s long running series, CORONATION STREET and it was Pat who was the other
queen, the reason for the dinner.
Hopefully, Pat’s career and celebrity need no elaboration here so I shall cut to my
recollections of the memorable evening in Pat’s presence. I cannot bring myself to say ‘Pat’s
company’ because although I met her many times, her comportment was such that no one could
have doubted for a moment that they were being received by the Northern version of history’s
flamingly red-haired Tudor Gloriana!
On the night in question, we had all been into Bath to see Daphne duMaurier’s MY
COUSIN RACHEL at the Theatre Royal. Madame, La Phoenix, was graciously contemplating
taking this vehicle for her own talents out on the road, in short, to tour. It was, she would have us
believe, to probably become an annual peregrination to allow her to visit her adoring public and
for them to enjoy the privileged possibility of meeting her. Pope John Paul the Second couldn’t
have conceived a better strategy.
Actually, in those days her plan was to allow her to earn the money to enable her to live the
life that she perceived being Coronation Street’s Queen demanded. The actors in that deservedly
award-winning soap only had a very few weeks off each year from the arduous routine of
propping up the fortunes of Granada Television and, like the rock ‘n’ roll stars of the day were
fast learning, there was more money in touring than in record sales and certainly more than in
television salaries. Contrary to what may be thought, Corrie stars were not over-paid.
Pat’s tours of these plays, of which I was to see several over the years, were awesome. The
plays, all creaky old things, were straddled by La Phoenix and thus dominated by her. The other
cast were deferential, chosen for their ability not to shine and to provide a suitably obedient court
when out in public. I must make an exception to this generalisation in that when Pat married
Tony Booth, he, as consort, also starred. In Pat’s view, I’m sure Tony’s star shone with equal
brillo to her own although I sense that Tony Booth wasn’t that silly and played his part of
consort as expertly as he played his part on stage. That he loved her was undeniable; that he
knew how to handle her was a part of his love for her. I think it was in AN INSPECTOR CALLS
that I last saw them make this annual tour together, in Eastbourne at the Devonshire Park theatre.
The point of the night, well-anticipated by the adoring rows of pensioner blue-rinses who
had bought tickets to the sold-out performances, was that at the end of the show, after suitable
curtain calls, Madame would part the curtains and, all patrician (sorry) traces of the play’s main
character instantly discarded, emerge as Elsie Tanner to address the fans. I think Pat did it better
than Gracie Fields who always played similarly to the crowd. Gracie, however, always appeared
as ‘our Gracie’, Pat was never anyone’s except her own and always maintained a sort of
bewildering humility which, although successful, also came over as an impenetrable hauteur.
Leaning only very slightly forward from her dominant position on stage, she graciously
thanked all comers and ‘blessed’ them. The energy in the smiles and the joy in the expressions
that radiated from the auditorium towards the stage could have illuminated the whole of the
south coast and I imagine most of Pat’s audiences, given the choice of a visit to see her onstage
in Eastbourne or a trip over the Bay of Biscay on Concorde, would have been in no dilemma.
Anyway, as the story teller says, Ed and I met up with Sara and Pat and her escort and
friend, the actor Ernst Wolder, after the performance and returned for supper to Homewood.
Ernst, Austrian born, had appeared as a character in CORONATION STREET by the name of
Ivan. He too was delightful company and we talked until two in the morning. I can do no better
than quote from my journal: “Phoenix really is an apt name for someone who has come
through so much and who still stands up fighting. I think she is right when she
protests that it is only people who have screwed up personal lives who finally
conquer in ‘career’ situations. She was referring to the stalwart ladies of
Coronation Street but one can extrapolate … She was most interesting about
herself, Pat Phoenix, versus (sic) her character, Elsie Tanner, the working man’s
sex symbol. She perceives this relationship as a fight, a battle which goes on
every day of her life and which she knows she would lose if she ever let herself.
Maybe she has in fact already lost but if she has she is still very much aware of
the struggle. She is all ego, all ‘me’, all ‘I’ but those are the qualities of
perseverance and determination which ensures a kind of survival. They don’t
ensure happiness but in such a schizoid existence, if Pat Phoenix is unhappy,
Elsie Tanner would be happy and, I contend, vice-versa. She still so desperately
wants to be recognised as ‘an actress’ – throughout the evening she was rather
pathetically comparing herself to one of Sara’s other clients, Sian Phillips and
admitted that she was ‘looking for an intellectual’. Personally, I don’t think
she would want one even if she thought she had found one. However, I DO think
that she needs someone who would gather her in his arms, say ‘I love you’ and
mean it. As she was talking, and smoking incessantly, she seemed so frail, like a
vulnerable bird, so conscious and aware and yet drugged by a potentially, almost
fatal fascination with herself. Yet, she is a legend and it was a joy to meet
her. She is ‘True Grit’ and, in the words of Naomi Jacob, ‘… it’s the shit of the
little women of England which make this country great’. Miss Phoenix is a little
woman ‘though her stature is monumental.”
But to return to the stars in my everyday life who were somewhat more permanent fixtures
than Miss Phoenix. Freddie, of course, was delirious with jealousy when I told him about our
having had Elsie, as t’were, for dinner. There were few moments in my life when I felt that I
could come even remotely close to making Freddie jealous that I gloried in his reaction. I took
less delight in the other events which evolved around him before any of us could enjoy those
darling buds of May because, as I have already indicated, by very early January it was clear that
the relationship between he and David, these two of my closest friends, was, if not actually on
the rocks, then terminally unsalvageable.
I felt the demise more sensitively than most because their relationship was one of the two or
three very reasons why I was at Homewood, with Ed, having left an old life behind as
reluctantly, so he was beginning to realise, as Freddie was about to abandon David. The scenario
could not but urge me to acknowledge that neither was I in the most perfect amatory situation
and, like David, was also entirely dependent for my security on the whims of another. However,
at least for the immediate future, I had some sort of tenure, however precarious whilst David
Minns was faced with having none at all and rather sooner.
I have explained in other books how contradictory Freddie was when it came to the ends of
his affairs. His was a personality which urged him not to be greedy but to want everything he
could possibly have. There is a difference and it’s best explained in a line from one of the
QUEEN songs where he sings, passionately, “I want it all and I want it now …” He hated the
thought of relinquishing his relationship with David and yet couldn’t resist pursuing his new love
interest. Of course, he and we knew the ultimate outcome. To add fuel to a conflagration that was
already well and truly alight, David was also, as I have previously explained, employed by
Freddie’s company Goose Productions as both general manager and hands-on organiser of the
affairs of the clients of the company which included Peter Straker’s as well as Freddie’s.
I suppose that nowadays even in civil partnerships of this ilk, there would be a ‘pre-nup’, as
the Americans call the financial arrangements agreed upon by partners intending to wed should
the unthinkable happen and the marriage break down. Did Elton and David have a pre-nup?
Tommy Watkins and Darron didn’t and they are rumoured to be about to go to court. Oh, how I
would love to know when the first gay ‘pre-nup’ was initiated!
But soft … In 1978, there was all to play for in the F Mercury/D Minns situation and both
players had a lot to lose. Freddie was already compensating for his guilt with his usual generosity
and had offered to buy David a flat. That’s when I knew that there was to be no alternative
outcome for their relationship. It was ‘curtains’.
 The day before Valentine’s Day 1977 I went to tea with Freddie both to see the decorative
progress of his new flat in Stafford Terrace and to finally, on a one-to-one basis, meet the
fabulous Mister Fanelli. Later he was nick-named Liza. Liza Minelli, get it? Minelli … Fanelli?
If I can trust my journal notes, I was obviously under-whelmed at this meeting and to quote me:
“Joe made tea – he seems nice, although the word is its own misnomer. He said
very little and I’m sure although harmless enough, it all seems too unnecessary
to me. David called whilst I was there with the news that he had found a flat and
Freddie agreed to go and see it that evening.” Joe had ambitions to be a writer. Then.
We had a rather surreal conversation about elephants and Samuel Becket, as I recall. Sort of
proves I was trying to be nice. The play he ultimately wrote was called THE ELEPHANT JOKE.
Writing this now, almost thirty years later in 2005, I cannot even begin to understand how
Joe must have felt, successively introduced as he was to the disparate bits and pieces of Freddie’s
life. I intuit that he probably felt not unlike George Elas, Ed’s former partner, whom I had
similarly displaced not a few months earlier although as I was to appreciate, I should not have
felt the slightest guilt about George for my turn to be dumped would surely come, as indeed
would Freddie’s. Eggs is eggs is eggs. To further mire the field of play, I see from my journal
that by February 15th, Joe had returned to America ‘for good’ taking with him a lot of Freddie’s
cash, an allegation which I find very difficult to believe in light of later life. As neither Joe nor
Freddie are here any more, I shall never know the truth about the runaway and the money but,
true or no, for once Freddie must have been left wondering where his life was headed, having
both been ostensibly dumped himself and having alienated his last ‘squeeze’ beyond
resuscitation. Talk about a man burning his bridges.
By the end of that week. I notice that David was at Homewood and we were talking late into
the night … “Freddie is apparently obsessed with flying off to America in pursuit
of Joe and following him back to the Springfield bar to where Joe has returned to
work. Finally, David admitted that he had now stopped loving Freddie. Horrible
thing to have to admit, but then, love is like a flower or a plant; lack of water
and nourishment or excessive frost will ultimately kill it no matter how valiant
a fight it puts up against the adversity of the elements …”
I have to crave readers’ forgiveness concerning the horticultural metaphors in my journal
extracts. I fear they will recur. More and more frequently. By the time David returned to London
two days later, he called me to say that Freddie had successfully re-imported Joe and that he,
David, was going to quit his job at Goose Productions … “He(David)sounded very final and
non-emotional. I think he means it. There is no human reason for him to stay
obliged to Freddie as an employee. But if he leaves, he should go away, out of
England for a while, away from spurious questions, greedy ears and wagging
tongues. Poor Freddie – he really has crossed the threshold of the syndrome. Like
Steve (Cat Stevens), like Elton, he too is now an identifiable non-human being,
transcended into a realm of his personal isolated reality, unreachable by anyone.
That is the price of fame. If only people really knew … but even if they did,
that knowledge would be no deterrent. It will happen again and again.”
The following day, I wrote again on my own account, about five thousand words of my
then-current novel, DEAD AND FALLEN HORSES, rather a contemporarily apt title, I noted
rather smugly in my journal.
I also noted this: “David called to say he was going to Australia and then called
back to say that he had changed his mind after speaking to Tim (Curry) and was
going to New York where Tim would go to the airport to meet him. He seems
desperate to go wherever he’s going on a Concorde flight although I advised him
that if he’s serious about divorcing himself from any personal relationship with
Freddie he should do what he can afford on his own salary and not try to glide
away on another’s jet stream. It’s hard, I know too well, mixing with people like
Reid and Freddie and the ‘star-iness’ of life will probably never leave him as it
has never left me and I know he will flutter through this holiday/break, call it
what you will, on Mercury’s wings. Jesus! If Mercury is really the messenger of
the gods, I hope he never brings a telegram to my door, singing or otherwise!”
Freddie called several times whilst David was away in New York, greatly concerned. I
cannot deny him that caring part of his nature although I never really knew whether the concern
was for David’s welfare or that of his own conscience. Our conversations were more like
confessions on his part and there was little I could say. It wasn’t in my power or my inclination
to bless him or curse him and so I mostly just listened because there was always a lot of other
stuff to listen to.
When David and Tim called me from New York, I said little about Freddie’s continuing
participation and concern except to reply to David’s question honestly as to whether or not I had
heard from Freddie. But there were other callers, namely Peter Straker, Freddie’s really-really
‘best friend’ and also, by now, a client of Goose Productions which by then, by dint of Freddie’s
producing his recently recorded album, was managing his recording and performing affairs.
Straker was not best pleased at being left in the lurch and, understandably, wondered when the
hell Minns would be back at work and whether indeed David would ever be returning to Goose
Productions. This triangular relationship of Freddie/David/Straker was fraught with competitive
tension from the outset but to explain it would involve writing Peter Straker’s life’s story too and
I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. Suffice to say that all Freddie’s lives and loves always
involved spin-off complications in other people’s, but I’m sure that such is the case when even
mortal men and women change partners.
 Tim Curry and David Minns 1979
Ed was not good with these emotional upsets. He simply could not deal with either the
problems or the people to whom the problems belonged. He retired rather than stepped up when
the emotional flack was flying. I think, for I shall never know, that he was impatient with those
with emotional problems and those undergoing difficult affairs of the heart.
When David returned to London on March 6th with the full intention of remaining in his job
with Freddie, Straker’s question was answered. Did we all breathe a sigh of relief? Instead of
wasting breath, I for one was content merely to hold mine, having wasted quite enough in the last
three months on my dear friends and their problems.
And I was right to hold my breath. Friday 10th March proved to be D-Day. David Day.
Dilys’ Doom’s day. “At about four o’clock, Minns called, in tears, saying that he
had taken a whole load of pills after a telephone row with Freddie. I told him to
drink salt and water and try and be sick – he tried, but to no avail. (What did I
know about attempted suicide?) I
called Sarah Forbes, the nearest and, in fact, only
person I could think of to go round (to Dovehouse Street) and help him. What an
angel! Round she went and hawked him off to St Stephen’s hospital where he was
admitted for the night. I thank God she was around to help and especially as she
had been to dinner with Minns the previous evening and knew what had been going
on in his life.
David must be having a minor nervous breakdown as he is displaying all the
symptoms I remember from my last turn of depression some five years ago. I called
Clodagh (Wallace - Tim Curry and Peter Straker’s manager and our mutual friend) as Minns
had asked to see her and she went over to St Stephens hospital. She called later
to say that she had seen David and that he was asleep. Freddie also called – but
what could I say – I can’t talk to him at this point – probably no one can.
Anyway, it was left that I am to go up to London early tomorrow to collect David
and bring him down here to sort out whatever there is to sort out … Goodnight,
world. I’m so tired today and my head hurts, but not, I’ll bet, half as bad as
poor David’s, ‘though.”
I later learned that Freddie had been with Peter Straker at Douglas Trout’s hair salon when
this crisis erupted. I am worldly enough and passing wise in the arcane arts of PR to realise that it
would not have been useful for Freddie to have gone himself to attend to David’s condition at
their flat as who knows what press may have been alerted and by whom and may have been
staking the place. However, I was not best pleased. Maybe David’s action was but a cry for help
‘though so many such cries have gone unheeded and have resulted in mortal outcomes.
In the end my dear Sarah, a girl of only seventeen, had stepped in and saved a day which I,
over a hundred miles away, was powerless to personally affect. It was to be the first of many
subsequent occasions when she has rushed others in dire straits to hospital, her own husband and
children included in much later years. However, to my knowledge, she has only ever had to deal
with one suicide attempt.
I can say no more about the day except that I don’t know exactly how far from Dovehouse
Street the hairdressing salon was … maybe a mile? Two at most. Although at the time, for once,
I kept my counsel, the intervening years have done nothing to allow myself to forgive Freddie’s
and Straker’s contemptible behaviour. And now, 2008, David himself is dead too … At least
Straker made some amends and sang at his memorial service at St John’s, Waterloo on Saturday,
27th October, 2007. His programme that day was THE LORD’S PRAYER and Dusty
Springfield’s YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME, my suggestion.
I wrote this at the time of David’s suicide attempt…
Wicked Queen Consults Self-Image

Mercury’s an honest thing in barometric

measure
Rising, falling, no mistakes
Correct in every weather.
Smoothed on glass or rubbed on brass
It makes a true reflection
But mirror, mirror on the wall,
Your fairest truth’s deception …
 Chapter Seven

I sensed I had grown old today

When melancholy chose to stay;
Despite the token smoking gun,
The battle’s lost, the war is won …

“I got up at six and was on the way to London by six-forty-five. Very misty
on the way but I was at St Stephen’s by nine. Discharged David who had over-
nighted in a ward for dropouts. It must have been very sobering – apparently one
man had died and yet another had jumped out of a window! The sun was shining by
the time we left Dovehouse Street. David was quiet and slept for about half the
journey back to Homewood. Got back about twelve. He then went to bed and slept
‘til four. Best thing.”
I cannot explain how helpless I had felt over the past twenty-four hours. The frustration of
the powerlessness you feel when someone you love is hurt and in what could have been terminal
distress is a reality check no one should ever have to go through. David himself must have been
utterly distraught when he awoke from his sleep after the ministrations of the stomach-pumpers
at the hospital. Suicide, even the attempt at it, is a frightening phenomenon as much to the
perpetrator as to the onlookers. To irritate the aftermath, in a horrible co-incidence, Sarah and her
parents, Bryan and Nanette Forbes, were due for lunch with us the next day, Sunday. If I’d sewn
the shroud of this debacle myself, I couldn’t have perfected neater seams.
Poor David understandably didn’t know how to face anyone, let alone this family who
would, after all, have naturally known all the details of Doom’s Day from their daughter. There
was no point in pretending that what had happened had not happened. Although I exerted no
pressure upon him, there was obviously an unspoken pressure which I could – once again – do
nothing about.
And so I thought it jolly brave of him that he decided to get up and come down to lunch and
be as normal as possible under the circumstances. Indeed we had a lovely day with Keith Wilson
and his partner Ian. It was in the days of high style and the Forbes arrived driven by their trusty
chauffeur Reg who was subsequently gathered much too soon. He was a wry and wise man of
few but pithy words and is sorely missed.
 Freddie and David Minns When The World Was Young
I’m not sure and cannot remember how many wise or pithy words were involved in my
conversations with David over the next few days but he seemed to be calmer after devoting
himself to a lot of gardening and outside work. David had never been a talker. He always had
areas of his life and nature which he maintained strictly off-limits and I have never pushed. I
have always acknowledged the threshold over which I cannot pass and it concerned me only to
observe the no-go signs. I will never know, and didn’t know then, the true nature of David’s
feelings concerning the end of his affair with Freddie. In truth, my own character is something of
a similar variety. I don’t always want everyone to know everything about me. I think I think that
if I thought anyone knew everything, I would be rendered less interesting, not to other people,
perhaps, but certainly to myself because, protest or not, the best conversations I ever have, or
had, are either with myself or with dead people. Now, there’s an admission I shall probably
regret!
 On the 14th March, Freddie called and a few and very final things were said although David
was noble enough to assure Freddie that on his return to Dovehouse Street, he would clear up as
much as he could of any unfinished business at Goose Productions. I am not able to and therefore
cannot record the ‘first he did this’ and the ‘then he did that’ of the relationship with David and
Freddie. It was their affair, not mine although it was the second time I learned to my cost the
repercussions which can issue from the relationships of one’s nearest and dearest. After all, I was
still scarred from the Michael Hannah and Twinkle debacle of which I have written in
APPOINTMENTS WITH THE DREAM FAIRY.
Is the reason why we all weep quietly and sob silently at funerals, instead of screaming
angrily and raging volubly and helplessly, that endings are better accompanied by whimpers
rather than bangs? All the sound and fury is usually exhausted in most people’s lives by the time
they’re dead and perhaps the same goes for relationships. Certainly in David’s and Freddie’s,
there had been altogether too much bang. The walls of the rented Dovehouse Street flat were
impregnated with the shrapnel from glassware hurled by both David and Freddie in mutual rage.
Expensive shrapnel, too. Lots of it was Lalique. L-o-L.
I’m amazed neither of them was ever cut although they both emerged from their affair
scarred within, invisible scars which one didn’t necessarily see. Though Freddie was destined to
go on to love again in a fashion which passed for ‘normal’, David never formed another
relationship, not of the domestic sort of couple-dom that he might have had with Freddie. The
end of April 1978 marked both their last chances. The kind of life upon which Freddie was now
embarked rather precluded anything ‘normal’. However, for those he loved who were able to
enjoy the ups and downs of both gay and straight ‘married’ life, he always felt and displayed
pride and a quiet envy.
It was only three short years since, like a putative father-in-law, I had insisted on knowing
what Freddie’s intentions were to my oldest friend … Now, too late, I knew and, finally, so did
he.
 Chapter Eight

Long time ago I thought I knew

A lot more than I needed to.
Well, I thought wrong and now I know
Much less than I knew long ago …

March filtered into April and the pace of the change of seasons gathered. The repairs and
renovations of the infrastructure of the garden – stables, outhouses, potting sheds, greenhouses
and cold and growing frames – proceeded. Earth was changed in the greenhouses in preparation
for my plans which were patently exuberant if not over-ambitious in the extreme. The space I
prepared in one greenhouse for tomato plants and sweet green and red capsicums as well as
cucumbers would, if successful have fed the whole village and duly, I’m pleased to report, did. I
began finding clumps of rhubarb all over the garden and loathe to disturb them and ignorant of
how to re-plant them, the garden landscape began that spring with dozens of old buckets and
pieces of broken chimney sheltering these precious - what? Fruits? Or is rhubarb a vegetable?
The rhubarb covers looked like ventilation outlets for a vast underground mine working.
The energy I expended on the garden paths that I laid and relaid, the garden and rockery
steps and stones that I both adjusted and installed was as nought when compared to the trenches I
dug and manured for runner beans and the rows I hoed and earthed over the sprouting new
potatoes. The work may have all but broken my back but it ensured that we had little need for
vegetable buying for the rest of the year. The kitchen and walled garden’s cold frames were
repainted and re-glazed where necessary, new earth and manure dug in and the lettuces, radishes,
spring onions and flower seeds which grew there were as a miracle to me when the green shoots
appeared.
I was convinced that the earth around me was desperate to be enriched and from my journal,
I note that I seem to have been obsessed with dung and manure, grateful for every scrap I could
acquire. I welcomed my neighbour Trisha Luxmoore’s request to graze her two horses on the
park’s paddocks and noted: “Lovely; every bucketful of their shit will be like
caviar to me!” And of course, it didn’t escape my notice how lovely Trisha’s horses looked
beneath the tulip trees and the maples, the chestnuts and the young oaks and I wondered …
However, I had more concerted plans regarding chickens and one of the old stables,
obviously once used for a pony - which had probably pulled the mowing machine in days gone
by before the arrival of the flimsy and temperamental Mountfield Wheelhorse -was re-recruited
to serve as the poultry house. After painting the place, I even paved a yard in front of it behind
the wire and carefully mortared between the slabs of the Cotswold-type stone which abounded
all over the park. This was surely one of the most luxurious chicken houses ever seen, although
the nesting facilities -rescued orange boxes and lettuce crates - might have been assembled in a
more craftsman-like way.
But needs must and, with somewhere for them to live, I duly placed my order for six hens –
Amber Links – which arrived from Mr Millard’s farm across the road. I’ve forgotten how much
they cost then. Now, in 2005 when keeping poultry as pets in one’s back garden is even
fashionable, a hen arrives with a price tag of some ten pounds. Mine were the prettiest hens,
white and full-feathered with tan speckles through their plumage and, although I’d read a book
on the subject, I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was doing with them. I fancied I was fulfilling
some genetic prophesy as both my grandfather and father had kept hens whilst I was growing up.
I was determined to outdo my heritage and thus my hens occupied what might have been judged
the Versailles of the hen-coop world.
The arrival of my hens wasn’t the end of my livestock aspirations. I had plans for geese. The
figure of how many had not yet been revealed to me. I had always been most impressed by the
watchful qualities of the geese who had once lived on Rome’s Palatine Hill. I know. Barking,
darling. It was barmy. I was rapidly going quite, quite mad possibly even as mad as Freddie in
our respective quarantined unreality.
My parents were still frequent visitors. I know my mother, a natural and easy snob when she
didn’t carry the responsibility for it on her own shoulders, luxuriated in the ‘big house’ delusions
which Homewood promoted in several of the folks who came over the threshold. Not to infer
that she lounged around in pink fluffy slippers all day – quite the contrary: she sewed and
hemmed curtains and weeded and cleaned along with the rest of us but I remember the look in
her eye when, after a hard day’s work, we sat and gazed over the huge expanse of beautifully
mown lawn outside the drawing room across to the burgeoning herbaceous border and admired
the huge copper beech and the park trees as they came into leaf. To see and appreciate and take
pride in such a garden is a memory most English people would take to their graves as
ULTIMATE proof of their Englishness, should proof be required at the Pearly Gates. To have
had even the most temporary lien, the merest sniff of a timeshare on such a dream acre, is a
privilege that only accidentalism could possibly confer on ninety-five percent of Britons. The
feeling of bursting pride that your own hand has had to do with the enjoyment is indescribable.
My father rarely relaxed in his whole, long life and at Homewood, he was an extraordinary
help to Ed in the conversion of the remainder of the coach house which, now devoid of the huge
oil tanks feeding the Aga and the rest of the central heating after the conversion of the supply to
gas, was ripe for refurbishment and redecoration. Though neither would ever have said, then,
they got on rather well together, both DIY-ers to the end. Although Ed was somewhat more
proficient, both were cack-handed and impatient in the extreme. I who was lectured on the evils
of impatience as a child, watched, bemused, at dad’s obliviousness to his own teaching. It was
quietly satisfying.
However, they would have rather regarded their impatience as un-reined enthusiasm and, so
be it, to an extent it compensated for whatever lack of expertise they encountered. In the ultimate
acts of DIY, neither, thankfully, baulked at calling in the plumbers and the electricians.
Whatever they were doing on Ed’s birthday on April 16th out there in the ruins of the Coach
House was as nought compared to what my father was doing on that day some twenty-seven
years later. It was to be the date of his death. But back in 1978, dad also started to write his
memoirs. Was it that he had seen my typewriter covered, as was Dorothy Parker’s, beneath a
towel on the kitchen table and which inspired him to also undertake his son’s ambition ? I would
like to think so, but it probably wasn’t.
My parents were wonderful house-sitters. Although Jan was rightly wary of the volatile
Mary, my mother, she liked and trusted my father, Pat and it was thus, with them installed, that
we left for one of our final visits to Scotland at the end of March to clear the last remaining stock
from the Dundas Street shop, arrange for the removal of the packed items to the local salerooms
to fetch what it would fetch and to hand the keys back to the shop’s landlords as the lease was
now at an end.
I noted that we also visited Aunt Mabel in Dundee with photographs of Homewood and thus
with a view to persuading her that a visit to her friend Jan would be quite safe and that she
wouldn’t be accommodated in a caravan on a building site! However, in the last months since we
had seen her, age had finally caught up with her and it was all too clear that Mabel would be
going nowhere outside Dundee, yet would be making a far longer journey sooner rather than
later. Tears filled her eyes as she looked at the photographs. Like my mother, how she would
have gloried in the ‘big house’ world back to which she sent us packing with the admonishment
that we ‘didn’t visit often enough!’
The saleroom business with Aldridges in Bath that Ed was doing was also increasing and we
had several old customers who came and, surprisingly, bought items which they had seen many
times before but which in a different environment spoke with fresh voices. Most antique dealers
will tell you that as soon as the position of a sticky piece of stock is changed within the shop, it
often sells immediately. Kim North, one of the up-and-coming young auctioneers and valuers at
Bonhams salerooms in Scotland, before the company became established in London, was a
frequent visitor to Homewood with his wife Caroline as they were mulling through thoughts of
launching an operation in the West Country although, sadly, this never happened.
As the urgent immediacy of much of the work on the house abated, Ed had more time to
restore his possessions. He was expert at taking apart and cleaning French ormolu clocks and
was not inexpert at adjusting and oiling and generally servicing many long case clocks whose
movements were also, surprisingly, far less complicated than their outward appearances
suggested. He was a dab hand at mending china, almost invisibly and at replacing chipped or
peeled veneers on the wooden cases of all types of furniture. He took great pride in how his stock
was presented.
And I succeeded finally in selling my London flat. I have been asked lately why I decided to
sell the property instead of renting it and the answer is that I have no idea. I don’t think renting it
even crossed my mind. Perhaps, indeed, I did do the necessary sums to see if the rental would
cover the mortgage but even if I did, I cannot recall doing so. I think that perhaps the notion that
one’s property would increase hugely in value was not part of the thinking of the nineteen-
seventies, unlike the later decades of the century when property prices increased beyond all
measure. If there was a reason, it might have been that the flat represented a life I had left and
wanted to leave far behind. Dumb reason, I now realise and humbly acknowledge what might
appear my own stupidity. However, in my defence I would point out that in those days the
danger of a tenant overstaying their initial lease was very real and remaining with the landlord
having little redress. Landlords had even fewer rights then than they do now, in fact the very
term ‘landlord’ attracted little social respect.
The late Frank Caldwell at Harbottle and Lewis saw the completion of the conveyancing
and, as far as I could tell, I thus finally bade adieu to ever living in London again. For the
foreseeable future, I was therefore destined to continue to be either a house-guest or a lodger. My
bank accounts were duly refreshed with the grand sum of £12,992.31 and a refreshing after-
cheque which the purchaser, a Mr Browning, paid for the carpets. I’d put £5000 into the property
and, thus, I was rather smug about the seven thousand pound plus profit. I was learning. Property
was on the rise.
I was less than thrilled to learn almost immediately that Ed expected me to invest my money
in his business. I suppose I should have acquiesced with alacrity but I had to remind myself that
the work and labour I was expending upon and in and around a property of which I owned not a
brick nor a tile nor a portable sod of earth was entirely un-compensated financially. As a gay
partner, I had no rights whatsoever. In fact I doubt a straight partner would have enjoyed the
law’s protection in the same circumstances should a separation have taken place. And, I wonder
if Ed remembered that I had seen what had come of his previous partnership with George Elas,
of how impossible it had been for him to allow George any real say in the business and of the
acrimony in which the venture had sunk. Having said that, I for one was accounting for my
presence at Homewood, which was certainly not in the least parasitical despite my lack of desire
to invest in Ed’s business. I had been contributing to the food and maintenance expenses and
personal petrol costs from the outset. But, I must have seen the denouement coming. Oh no, dear
Lord, please not another dilemma!
I now thank whatever Lord I was imploring that I resisted Ed’s invitation to invest. I would
continue to buy and sell objets on my own account but something told me that I should hold back
on the big stuff … Maybe that ‘something’ is reflected in an entry in my journal at the beginning
of April: “I wonder if I shall ever have another love affair? Chance does not
preclude it but I wonder if I ever would – or is the word COULD? Interesting and
terrifying at the same time …”
I realise now that other than being deeply delusional, I must also have been deeply depressed
– again. Not in a disabling way but in a work-a-day, everyday state of mind. I’d already had two
big bites at the depression cherry but I wasn’t familiar with the state in the way that I ever
identified myself as being a depressive. That I indubitably was depressive was not revealed and,
therefore, acknowledged for many years to come, after both my brother and sister had suffered
because of what I know firmly believe is a shared genetic trait. There was nothing to ‘deal with’
then but that ever-tired fog behind the eyes and a desire to sleep and melt into invisibility.
In 1978, when the world was still relatively young, much of my current depression was
probably brought about by living within as well as through the winter; the lowering grey skies,
the cold, the debilitating damp and the invisible horizon, the general lack of sunshine … It’s a
condition which at about that time was being revealed to the world as having a name, Seasonal
Affective Disorder but I wasn’t to know. I contend that the condition is what made Hedda Gabler
even faintly interesting. If only she could have been packed off to the south of France we
wouldn’t have had to have sat through relentless performances of that boring play. Like Hedda,
I’ve never done winters well, probably because I was born in the middle of one of the least
comfortable ones and in 1947 I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of leaving Mary’s warm,
comfy womb for the cold late February reality outside.
In my journal I waffle on for pages about S.A.D. Here’s one particularly pretentious bit
regarding Monday 3rd April: “Got up to a very grey day. Minns sparked me off on a
giant theory which I will (nor can) never prove of a bio-chemical-cum-spiritual
correlation between man’s glum, deeply depressed periods and the lack of ultra-
violet and other helionic rays from the sun when the earth is covered with cloud!
There must be a connection but how direct it is can never be known. After all,
flowers and plants don’t really open up until the sun shines and they always
close again at sunset.”
 Now, how S.A.D is that? Passing pathetic at the time and yet, later, somebody researched
and published and proved the theory and gave it a name.
However, there were always the visitors to raise the game. Richard and Gillie Denton came,
three months pregnant with what turned out to be baby Oliver, born in September 1978. For
some reason, I remember him, born, as a snuffly, nasal child. He grew up, unlike his father, to be
very tall and last heard of was teaching English to Japanese. He apparently likes Japanese girls.
I note that I was very put out by Sarah’s taking up once again with John Reid although, in
April 1978, the relationship seems to have been resurrected in merely platonic mode but I failed
to conceal my disapproval and, now, have come to the conclusion that I was probably jealous as
well as being naturally concerned. But neither the history nor the biology added up and it never
has. Married couples of whom one was gay was still an area of social behaviour I had not widely
encountered and, within my still naïve perspectives, was something I couldn’t get a handle on. I
cannot believe that I could have been so often duped and have been that stupid. The failed
infatuation I had suffered with Clive Banks should have told me. I really do think my middle
name should not have been Michael but DUMB!
However, the phenomenon of ‘mixed’ marriages has always eluded me. A man and a
woman, gay in whatever proportions, living together in open and honest affection, hiding nothing
either from themselves or anyone else, is one thing but marrying and becoming husband and wife
and maintaining a ‘hetero’, normal, Mr and Mrs front with all the ‘sshh-don’t-tell-Nancy’
ramifications is way beyond my comprehension. Now I’m older, I’ve met many such couples
and I still don’t understand … I think it’s the lie that I have difficulty with. I believe in what was
once written, either by me or someone else: “The truth requires no upkeep; lies are always high
maintenance.” And the cost is emotional, as Freddie was to sing about later. THE GREAT
PRETENDER rings bells and strikes chords with legions of gay people.
Tim Curry re-appeared in our lives in March having not recorded a single note of music for
A and M Records or anyone. The putative production talents of Bob Ezrin had been temporarily
withdrawn because of illness although Tim explained that the recording schedule was now to
begin in May. As if to validate the upcoming sessions, Ezrin himself and his wife Francesca
arrived at Homewood too, as Tim’s guests (!) on 29th April.
Tim was unusually lugubrious – i.e. more than usually lugubrious – and as such reluctant to
rise to Ezrin and his wife’s enthusiastic view of life and the world, the Ezrins’ world being not
solely centred on the music business and personal ambition. What a breath of fresh air they were!
However, Tim’s remarks to Ed don’t particularly identify him as a passionate
performer/musician in the making: “You get a bit fed up hearing about trumpets all day long …”
and “I get the feeling we could be making a hit record …” each have the ring more of lines from
a forgotten Presley movie or HAPPY DAYS rather than a rock star interview in INTERVIEW or
VILLAGE VOICE. Tim still had the drama series in which he played William Shakespeare to
come out in June of 1978 as well as a television play, CITY SUGAR, scheduled for a September
broadcast. With plans to join the National Theatre in 1979, if I’d been Jerry Moss who owned A
and M Records, I wouldn’t have paid threepence for him to have even recorded a “Mind The
Doors” announcement for the London Underground. With his apparent schedule, when would he
have had time to tour? He didn’t seem to understand that whatever he records and for
whomsoever, the record company will insist that he tours! In hindsight, his lack of enthusiasm
about his recording career would seem to indicate that he was beginning to realise that, three
years after ROCKY, his moment for international multi-level superstardom had passed. But how
to stop the rolling balls? There was, so to speak, a real rub …
I was beginning to feel like Tim’s housekeeper at HIS country home! Truth to tell, he didn’t
really bring anything to the table other than that he was a bit of a star. But, squelching one’s way
over the sour grapes, I have to mention that not only did Tim invite another of his friends, the
actress Brook Adams and her then partner John for the day, he also brought Peter Wood into our
lives. Of all Tim’s newly acquired friends, Peter Wood who lived in the neighbouring Somerset
village of Batcombe was, however, in a different category. It seems initially somewhat
disrespectful that Ed and I nicknamed him ‘The Batcombe Belle’.
Just to show he could still fire on all cylinders, Tim eschewed gloom and was effusively
enthusiastic about Peter Wood. Could I sense a play in the offing? Even if I didn’t, Tim was
nonetheless to feature in an upcoming West End production of Tom Stoppard’s TRAVESTIES,
in which Tim would play the Dadaist Tristan Zara. Peter Wood had long been Tom Stoppard’s
director, although their working relationship wasn’t unique. Peter had worked with other equally
stellar dramaturges and also directed opera, notably every year at the festival of that art in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. When not in London at his flat in Little Venice, he had established himself at
Batcombe in a beautiful old cottage he called, quaintly and, for him, rather unimaginatively, The
Old Barn, a name I’ve always seen, personally, on a par with Chez Nous.
When I first met Peter Wood, he appeared homely, friendly, shaggily, oursinely handsome
and although I probably should have fancied him, for some reason I didn’t and indeed detected
no particular sexual vibration. I noted that he didn’t ‘come on at all’, whatever that meant, and
I further opined that he was ‘at the top of his profession and quietly dignified about
the whole thing …” At another meeting, I noted that: “Do hope that P Wood turns into a
good friend and neighbour.” Peter indeed turned into a wonderful neighbour as I turned into
a wonderful neighbour to him. However, the friendship thing was obviously predicated by the
neighbour thing and away from the ‘hood, the friendship was to wilt as quickly as a plucked
bluebell in a hot hand although we had a way to go before that demise.
As a codicil to the Somerset Spring of Timothy Curry, I mention that it was with little or no
emotional significance that I wrote in my diary of a conversation with Ed at the end of April in
which he revealed to me, rather baldly, that Tim had made many ‘passes’ at him. I recorded the
confidence obviously with some surprise and a little indignation but I ended my diary entry - for
obviously I read between my lines to infer that Tim and Ed had indeed enjoyed more than the
unrequited excitement of a mere ‘pass’ - with the observation that: “ … he’s a real actor,
totally dependent on a script someone else has written for him to endow him with
life and movement. Still, he is a friend, a friend in need and wanting; he IS a
friend …”
I told you my middle name was dumb.
So to the end of this chapter which could never be complete without the telling of what
remains of the untold story, that of my dearest dears, David and Freddie. On the 11th April,
Freddie had set off on a five week tour of Europe and I remarked, interestingly, that David,
although still sensibly living out the remainder of the lease on their flat in Dovehouse Street, was
already attempting to fly Freddie’s coop and was applying for jobs. He was, also sensibly,
seeking out areas away from the music industry although in allied spheres; one of the interviews
he had was for a job with David Litchfield and our old friend the photographer David Bailey but
nothing was immediately forthcoming of the sort of job to which he thought he would be suited.
Freddie, characteristically, couldn’t leave well enough alone and continued to call both
David and I throughout that month, refusing to believe that he couldn’t help in one way or
another, reluctant to understand what he was being told from both David and I which was,
basically, “let’s leave it for a while, dear. Go off and rule the world but let the dust settle here at
home …” I think it was about perfectionism. More than in any other friend where perfectionism
was a dominant characteristic, Freddie’s irrepressible desire, nay deep-set need, to ‘tinker’ with
things that were already as perfect as perfect could ever be defined and as practicable as perfect
could ever allow, was the cause of a lot of the bumps in his road. Mostly, he was allowed to ‘get
on with it’ and his efforts merely applauded all the more when he was ready to display them.
There was discernible movement in the plates underpinning QUEEN too at this time. The
recurrent appearances of Jim Beach, one of the perceived whiz-bang new generation of lawyers
generated by Laurence Harbottle had been interesting. I don’t know if John Reid knew at this
point, but he had ceased being flavour of the month with QUEEN as far as three out of four of
his newly acquired (in 1976 at least) clients were concerned. I know that Freddie didn’t want to
leave Reid and vehemently protested. However, the others, Brian May, Roger Taylor and - one
presumes - John Deacon did want to leave and in the course of the months around this time,
change management they did. I’d like to think that their discontent had been a wake-up call to
Reid although to awake to see the horse running from the unbolted stable can’t have been at all
salutary.
On the 30th April, we cleared David’s remaining boxes and luggage from Dovehouse Street
and … Well, my brethren, there ended the lesson. But what had I learned? What had any of us
learned? Throughout the recent events, I had been feeling unsettled and, worse … Sunday 23rd
April: “A lovely day appeared out of the wreathed morning mists. Quite the best
day at Homewood so far although a violent clash with myself. Panting, seething
hatred of the hidden depths of me – the dark side of light – how I hate me
sometimes. Soon calmed by the beauty of the park and garden in the early morning.
That night, the moon was low and red, as though it was bleeding me.”
The above could have been a rather wanky interpretation of a quotation from the I CHING
to which Peter Wood introduced me one evening at The Old Barn and upon which I was leaning
a little too heavily. My introduction to Confucian perceptions came when I, without Ed who was
away in Scotland, drove over to Batcombe to have supper with Peter and Roy Roberts, the noted
producer at Granada Television and Peter’s American friend, Chuck. I always thought Peter was
very like his house, a barn of a man, stored full of rambling thoughts, anecdotes, ‘knowledge’,
maybe even a bale or two of wisdom although his opinions were always questionable and his
conclusions often wrong. But out of the storehouse came the I CHING and I had been deemed a
ripe recipient for its use.
Was I so obviously desperate for direction of any description including the arcane? The I
CHING’s systemisation of the thoughts and observations of man versus his world collated by the
Chinese philosopher and mystic Confucius was fascinating as a jumping off point for anyone
engaging in the exercise of the analysis of their circumstances. It wasn’t suitable or useful to
everyone as neither the ‘reading’ resulting from the throwing of the symbolic sticks or coins nor
the interpretation of the hexagrams which the patterns of the fallen sticks reveal, is an easy
cerebral exercise.
As a pertinent example, I have written elsewhere of the consternation into which Freddie
was thrown after we had ‘consulted’ my newly purchased volume when he was visiting. I read to
him the following, which according to the revealed hexagram, supposedly summarised his
situation at the time of consultation. In essence, he heard the words “Freedom is a mountain
lake” and after a moment’s incredulity reacted with a series of mocking expletives which need
not even be imagined. I could immediately see what the I CHING was indicating regarding his
current state although when I tried to explain, his reaction was very much of the resigned, rather
irritated, “Well, then it’s not fucking magic at all, is it and there you have it,
dear!” I dread to think how he might have reacted to the one and a million interpretations that
his own lyrics to BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY must have generated. “Oh, fuck off, dear” is one
possible reaction that springs to mind.
I notice that I had had the sense to remark as follows about my new found Codex: “It
should not be used as a prediction, as interpreting the present to reveal the
future is impossible. No man is wise enough to divine the undivinable. I have
been told so, today, by one who is divine.”
Although that makes me sound like a monastic stereotype out of a Kung Fu movie, I wish
the I CHING could indeed have predicted the future. I might have been able to ensure that
instead of drifting apart, Freddie and David and I might have spent the next three years closer.
Other than Christmas cards, Freddie’s and my worlds were, soon, hardly to overlap at all until at
least 1982.
 Chapter Nine

‘Summer is a-comin’ in, loudly sing cuckoo …’

So goes the traditional choral round that Daisy Gosden had taught us way back in my prep
school days at the Hill School in Malvern and ‘cuckoo’ is indeed both what Ed and I first heard
from our woods in that early month of May and also how we ended up behaving. A cuckoo is a
particularly conscience-less bird which throws out the eggs of other birds from their nests and
lays its own, single egg in their place, relying on the - to be blunt - stupidity of the original egg-
layers to raise the young cuckoo, a chick often five times larger than what would have otherwise
hatched. Now, why did I have cause to fulminate so in my soggy journal about cuckoos?
For those whose lives were led in the town and who were thus led rarely into the country,
that the appearance of England’s green and pleasant land at the beginning of May 1978 had been
altered beyond even the gloomiest forecast would have gone un-remarked. However, for the
squires in the shires, the hedgerows and lanes, the silhouettes of the ridges of hills, the feeling of
depth of shade in sheltering woodland had changed irrevocably because of a phenomenon which
had become commonly known as Dutch Elm Disease.
What the Dutch or anything in the Netherlands had to do with this beetle-borne infection I
have long since forgotten but England’s elm trees had died in their tens of thousands. The
disease had been rampant for some years but it was only in 1978 that I noticed the huge numbers
of great trees, naked of any sign of foliage, standing as though they were their own grave
markers. Their once, proudly strong boughs reached skywards as though in some supplication,
some silent screamed request for a reason why fate should have dealt them thus. Of course,
although the planet had continued to turn and suns had set and risen as usual and there had been
no accompanying human disaster such as an epidemic or plague, our world had become a poorer
place.
However, I suspect that not many people, I hazard, mourned as deeply as I did. Elms had
been part and parcel of my growing up. We had climbed them, watched cricket matches beneath
them, sheltered in their hollow trunks from thunderstorms and rain and we had climbed stairs and
walked floorboards made from their timber.
Maybe, as a mere and recent convert to country living, I was affected more. Like it’s only
new converts to Catholicism or Judaism or Islam who are obsessed with every doctrinal crossed
‘t’ and dotted ‘i’. As a scourge to further discomfort my conscience and to mitigate the ills of the
world, in May 1978 I also stopped smoking. I think Ed did too, for a while, although I was
successful for many months longer. But the sacrifice hardly helped either of our moods,
especially as Ed’s mother, an inveterate and unrepentant smoker, always urged cigarettes on both
of us as we sat with her in the evenings watching television.
I can’t imagine why I agreed that Tabitha could come and stay for a couple of weeks.
Perhaps I was more impressed with Peter Wood than I cared to admit but agree I did that his
white long-haired Persian chinchilla cat could come and stay. Silly did not even approximate to a
suitable verbal castigation for my actions – I had taken into account no one else’s feelings but
my own. Perhaps I wanted Peter Wood to like me more? I had forgotten my own cat, Rufus’s
feelings, totally blanked Jan’s reaction to Rufus’s feelings and been blind to my own prospective
irritation when the two-weeks-of-Tabitha favour turned into a two month exercise in keeping
apart and occasionally having to separate two spitting furies, one black, one white.
It was as though the cosmic battle between good and evil had temporarily located in our
kitchen. Stephen King might have written a spine-chilling tale of terror about the daily
confrontations which would often generate as from nowhere, Tabitha hurling herself from the top
of a cupboard at the passing of the smaller and entirely sweet-natured Rufus or creeping up on
her black sister as the latter lay asleep in some special private nook in the warm May sunshine.
And I didn’t even LIKE Tabitha at first, a dislike which was fostered as the two weeks
lengthened into months and each week at the supermarket I was faced with a bigger than usual
cat food bill. Evil, sadly, is not fuelled by the invisible forces of darkness and neither is the feline
variety fuelled by mere supermarket own-brand tins; the Tabitha sort of evil required expensive
Whiskas, at least, and at best lightly poached coley fish, skin removed, bones out.
Although, as can be gathered, I didn’t initially take to Tabitha, I was turning into something
of a spitting fury myself if my repeated notations in my journal observing my own behaviour are
credible. There appears to have developed a disharmony in our Elysian fields, a discord which
had blown in like the proverbial ill-wind. There was lots of verbal sparring with Ed, the
engendering within my soul of a seething, silent fury at his mother as well as a cornucopia of
recriminations directed towards myself, I was relentless in my own mortification, resorting once
to hurling a bottle of salad cream at the kitchen wall when Ed had poured some over a
particularly tasty potato and something dish I had presented for lunch one day which had needed
nothing more to accompany it than deep appreciation!
No wonder Ed and I were, unlike colliding tectonic plates buried deep in the earth, slowly
drifting further and further apart as our fluffy iles flottants saw more and blue water deepening
between them. Ed’s mood was changing too, as though he too sensed that the life he had wasn’t
quite the one he had bargained for and that, without my financial investment in his business, he
might even have to do a little proper work. After the initial pleasure in welcoming guests for
weekends and lunches and dinners, Ed had retreated from the position of gracious host to
disgruntled chatelaine. And of course, because so many of the guests came from my side of our
ocean, I felt an over-sensitivity when Ed’s displeasure was made known to me. As I said to him
more than once about guests, “You don’t HAVE to have them, you know. Just say no!”
Hence, only four days after the weekend with Mr Curry and his American team, it was with
intense trepidation that I approached Ed after having been telephoned by David Minns,
encouraged by our friend Cherry Brown with whom he had moved in, asking if he could bring
one of the world’s first ladies for the weekend. And a waiter. David was obviously so thrilled
with the deliciously clandestine idea that at first he wouldn’t – nay couldn’t – even name the first
lady in question and so, for a line or two, nor shall I. I would have made a dreadful spy as I can’t
bear secrets of any sort, burdened as I am with so many. Secrets make people lie. David, on the
other hand, exalted in the glamour of it all.
Let me explain.
There were once a Mr and a Mrs Trudeau, who were, respectively and respectfully and
possibly even regrettably, the current prime minister and first lady of Canada but Pierre, as he
was, and Margaret, as she was, were having their problems. These had not gone un-noticed and, I
was assured, had been quite widely publicised to the extent that at the time I met Mrs Trudeau,
the couple had in fact separated in a blaze of vituperative publicity. Margaret was currently in
London, expanding her horizons and those of several others it would seem, to write a book. Her
amanuensis was, at the time, a journalist by the name of Caroline Moorhead who worked,
principally, on THE TIMES. How posh. As though the name of the tree whose wood was used to
make the cross for the crucifixion lent any dignity at all to the proceedings. But, hey ho …
Perceptions are perceptions and if The Old Thunderer could lend its name to distinguish what
was possibly by any other name a grubby little enterprise, then so be it. And far be it for me to
judge. I wouldn’t have turned down the opportunity. I have wished many, many times in my life
to have had my work bear the validation of a mighty organ of any of the estates. I think so far
I’ve just once made the Daily Mail, and then only a re-printed extract from a book. Oh, and one
review for a novel, A HOLLYWOOD CONSCIENCE in The Sunday Times.
Anyway, although I was never made privy to the hows and whys and wheres, although the
ins and outs were to become only too plain, Margaret, at the end of her own world and adrift in
the outer depths of World’s End in the nether bit of London’s Kings Road had one late, dark
night obviously strayed into the sublime acreage of Country Cousin. No, the other country cousin
… Not me but the nightclub cabaret restaurant of the same name overseen by the deliciously
naughty Christopher Hunter and aided and abetted by the demurely deceptive Miss Cherry
Brown.
Cherry was nothing if not kind to her friends and one of hers, a lady called Peggy who lived
somewhere on the banks of the Thames in Berkshire had just temporarily divested herself of a
lover by the name of Gerard, surname Manchon, who had, in his parlously dumped state needed
a job and whoopee … Auntie Cherry comes up trumps again. The broodingly sexy and French
Monsieur Gerard must have been very good at waiting at the job Cherry found him at Country
Cousin for he waited and waited and ended up squiring La Trudeau to her – or his – bed one
evening and there did the business for France which General Montcalm had fluffed a couple of
centuries previously on the Heights of Abraham beneath the besieged city of Quebec. French
honour is therefore restored, the wicked and ungrateful Canadian turncoat soundly chastised. The
Canadian in question was left thoroughly penitent and gagging for more of the same humiliation.
Gerard had great culinary knowledge as well as being a much-vaunted lady’s man and knew
exactly when and where to put the meat in. He was and is VERY ‘Parisian’ - only English
readers will know what I mean - and when I met him had both enjoyed and endured a life which
had included a stint in the French army, tales of which made my hair stand on end. In private
conversation he flattered Ed by telling him that he would love to come back to Homewood in an
unencumbered state and that he loved the house, the garden and the grounds and appreciated
what Ed and I were doing with the property. Ironically, several years later when he was
permanently involved in a relationship with my friend Sarah Harrison with whom I had worked
when she was Cat Stevens’ secretary, he and Sarah did with a beautiful, ancient manor in Objat
in France what Ed and I were doing with Homewood. I’d like to think there was a link.
 Freddie, Dais and Sarah Harrison
So, finally, wrested as though after torture from his otherwise patriotically clenched lips,
David came clean with the name and thus I asked Ed if he wanted Margaret Trudeau and a
paramour for the weekend. “What’s a paramour?” Ed asked after nodding his grudging assent to
David’s request. It was the day we gave up smoking.
An hour and three-quarters after the scheduled time of the party’s arrival, Ed’s expression
was truly thunderous, only a tad angrier than mine as I had prepared and laid a feast fit for a first
lady which included OUR OWN RADISHES, the first harvest of our labours! Needless to say,
we maintained the proprieties beneath our decorous yet frozen smiles of welcome and, with these
denizens of the night, ate late. I remarked that: “… she is SO caught up with her self in
spite of denying it.”
The following morning, Ed and I drove into Bath early and when we returned, David was
penitently weeding between the rows of nursery lettuces although Margaret and Gerard didn’t
surface ‘til gone three in the afternoon. By then, Ed was very agitated and gave up being patient,
driving off again on the pretext of buying weedkiller! It could have been the prelude to a
wonderful Marple-ish murder mystery – Canadian First Lady found impaled on French
waiter with a huge smile on her face. An Agatha Christie rather than a West End Show
because, let’s face it, Margaret Trudeau was hardly another Evita.
 However, the end of the day saw Ed and Margaret firm friends after a bibulous evening
spent in the George Inn at Norton St Philip and a thoroughly parliamentary dinner back at
Homewood. “Margaret spoke of her plans for her book which could be very good. It
should be as she has had the benefit of enormous experience all over the world as
Mrs Trudeau as well as the added benefit of what she termed her ‘enlightenment’.
As she said, there are surprisingly few people in the world who ever take major
decisions in their own lives for themselves. Most are content to make decisions
for other people …” I kind of saw what she was getting at although I thought her rationale a
little drastic. I too had said goodbye to a major life, although not seeing the Queen again for me
only meant never going to one of Freddie’s concerts again. For Mrs Trudeau, the Queen really
was the Queen.
Reading this journal note now, I suppose we must have discussed the whys and wherefores
of the break-up of her marriage and her leaving husband and children to shag her way across
both the Atlantic ocean and the shires of England to our front door but I have completely
forgotten them and patently never recorded them. I can only remember feeling inexplicably
uneasy towards the end of the evening and walking out into the night, onto the main road and
then through the close park to check that we weren’t being stalked either by paparazzi or under
surveillance by strong, silent secret service agents. Paranoid? You bet.
The following day witnessed a similar schedule – us working in the garden, looking up at
the house which seemed to vibrate in syncopated rhythm with the bed-fest rattling on in our best
brass half-tester. Margaret and Gerard and David left for London on Monday, ending one of the
more surreal weekends of my life. “Ed thinks that La Trudeau is dying of something
whereas I prefer to think of marijuana or cocaine fucking up her brain. Still,
back she went to the real world to work on her book and she seemed sad to go …”
That night, as though he’d been reading my thoughts, Freddie called to check that we were
indeed still coming to the QUEEN concert at Wembley. I SO didn’t want to go and in that,
perhaps glimpsed that for Margaret Trudeau never to have gone to Buckingham Palace again was
a similar situation. Neither was that big a deal although if anything, mine was the bigger as I
wouldn’t have hurt Freddie for the world. Real Queens, I fancy, have thicker skins.
 Chapter Ten

First a dirty gin martini,

Then a glass of deep red wine
Puts the me back into meaning
And the magic in sublime.
Disappointments and frustrations,
Some small triumphs on the way,
Very little is remembered
Smell ye roses whilst ye may …

“The early summer is such a fragile time – everything you see looks like an
impressionist canvas; the trees wear petals of light for leaves and the watery-
green shoots are almost opaque in their unsettled youth. I thought there would
have been more blossom but the cold and recent damp seem to have, if not
decimated then surely retarded the show. Living in the country really is a case
of ‘six months on and six months off’.”
I invested the princely sum of £1.60 in my first batch of tomato plants and the day they were
planted, two days after the chickens arrived, we were also blessed with a laying of three eggs.
That I had been secretly singing to my Amber Links and sitting in the corner of their house as
though some crazed shaman casting pagan spells must go recorded but it IS a sad admission.
Another, equally sad, is that I read my father’s memoirs which he had been compiling and I now
cannot remember anything about them at all. I can remember reading them fifteen years later
when I typed them out onto computer disk before printing up a fair copy for including into the
family history which he had also been compiling but of the May 1978 experience, I remember
nothing. Naughty, David. Ungrateful boy. Rude and inconsiderate man.
Although dad asked me to do so, I felt compelled to edit the later version, adding my own
observations. Otherwise, without the collaboration, it would have turned out to be a volume of
fact and very little feeling as it seemed that my father was unable to express feelings. I have since
noticed that many other ‘autobiographies’ I have read, suffered in the same way. My father’s five
years of wartime incarceration formed the main body of the eighty pages of close-typed original
which is now in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Only twenty pages were left to the
account of his childhood and of his post war adult years. Not many pages in which to talk about
his children with any more depth than the dutiful recording of the dates of their births.
In recent correspondence with Stanley Lamb, my father’s cousin who is a fifty-five year
resident of New Zealand, he remarked to my sister that when he saw my father after the war,
having therefore not seen him for six years, the happy-go-lucky, carefree and cheerful cousin he
had known was barely recognisable. Stanley said he had never seen a greater change in a man.
Now, since my father’s death which also allowed Stanley to make such a personal remark, we
will never know the true depths and grossness of the experiences which dad underwent and
which so powerfully changed a man’s personality in such an irreversible manner. I can only
conclude that a significant part of my father’s inability to communicate with anyone on any
sensient level above the banal was because he could not entertain the recounting of any of his
experiences other, as I said, than the workaday or the sporting.
Hindsight advises me that in 1978 it was probably best that my exposure to his life-story left
me un-inquisitive because it would have been too painful for my father to have been subjected to
the barrage of questions my youth and insensitivity might have impelled me to put on him; after
all, those same prisoner-of-war experiences affected me equally deeply and irrevocably. I would
have liked to have had a father who’d demonstratively loved me more. I would liked to have
known my father as a man. It might have explained why I never felt secure in my knowledge of
him as a father. It might have helped to explain why I was so deeply sexually attracted to men
such as Ed Murray.
The only memory I retain of the electro-magnetic in school physics lessons is the following:
“Opposite poles attract; like poles repel.” I remember feeling the force of the repulsion between
two positively charged iron magnets. Powerful stuff. I took this, in life, in practical applied life to
mean that relationships were best when undertaken by parties of entirely opposite and therefore
complementary characters and attributes. It came as a great relief that I later learned that the
applied physics is not necessarily relevant to human beings.
Spring’s fragile growth was hardened-off come summer and included shaping the form of
two relationships which closely affected my own, those respectively between David and Freddie
and the random, vagabond, out-of-left-field one which I learned had rekindled between Sarah
Forbes and John Reid. The latter, first …
When Sarah told me that they had indeed resumed full-on, head-on, rock-on relations, I re-
examined the same mis-givings I had had in 1976 when we had been in Edinburgh. Then I had
settled for the che sera, sera solution but two years on, I now thought them rather well-matched
which, as time and tide have proved, they indeed were in a Will and Grace kind of way, to
borrow from a twenty-first century television sit-com about a gay man and his best Jewish
girlfriend …
I had known that Sarah and I had been drifting apart but at no time was this feeling more
validated when she exclaimed in a gush of breathy over-enthusiasm, “Come with us to The
Embassy (Club) tonight so that you can relate to us again …” Surely she must have
known that I had no desire to even drive down Bond Street in a closed hearse let alone spend
precious hours and even more precious money in the Embassy Club ever again. But nonetheless,
she managed to persuade me to drive up to London for a party at John Reid’s house for her
birthday on 21st May. I must have appeared like some tweedy aunt arriving from the country
because I note that I had packed up a basket for her which I left at Elm Place where I was to
sleep, a rustic basket containing eggs from my own hens, bread from our own oven, herbs from
our own kitchen garden, flowers from our own fields and borders and a hand-made birthday
card. I wriggle and squirm with embarrassment as I write this imagining how pretentious this
display could have been perceived. Sarah enjoyed her party. She had been fending off the
brickbats lately, not only from me but from her parents and many others concerning this passion
with John Reid. However, she is formidably stubborn, rarely takes ‘no’ for an answer and is
determined to succeed. Her response, therefore, when asked concerning her reasons for wanting
to be an item with Reid was: “The unobtainable is always more desirable.” The maxim was oft
repeated, as she was often asked ‘the’ question.
I was beginning to understand how far I’d wandered from ‘the fold’ and felt generally
uncomfortable with the other guests, people who had once been an integral part of my life. Alex
Foster, Jenny Over, Clive Banks … Oh, Clive! David White and David Bell, Clodagh and Jason
Wallace, Graham Carpenter, Straker, Laura Beggs and David and Caroline Croker who I invited
to come and stay as part of their peripatetic honeymoon of a marriage which was to last but a
very brief time. Simon Turner, Geoffrey Ellis, Russell Harty, James Fisher, Robin Nash and
Dolly and Ken East … and, why not, even Tim Curry who hadn’t even telephoned to say that he
was in London during a break from the Ezrin recordings in New York. He asked me to go down
to Montpellier Square and sit with him in Clodagh’s car as he wanted to play me the three tracks
which displayed some sort of finished aspect. They were what they were, one of which was
possibly rather good, a track entitled BIRDS OF A FEATHER for which I believe Tim wrote the
lyrics.
Despite my petty annoyance with him, I felt privileged that he wanted me to hear his work
before he played it to anyone else. I wished him well but we said goodbye that evening without
making any arrangements for his coming down to visit again. And when his record came out, he
neglected to send me a copy. Both records, for he made two in all. Fair enough – I should have
gone out and bought them but …
About the same time as Reid’s party, Ed and I decided that we could not possibly decline
Freddie’s insistent invitation to the QUEEN concert at Wembley Pool and so off we dutifully
trotted on Thursday 11th May. Memory contrives to have robbed me of that particular ‘inter-
neural facilitation’, as Caroline Boucher describes the working of memory and thus can do no
better than fall back on my journal: “… Funny. Nothing changes except that I remember
everything as being bigger than it was. It (the concert) was suddenly tawdry,
tacky and rather ordinary – a kind of grotesque market place where the pedalling
was in tarnished dreams and predictable miracles. Everyone had seen it all
before. The sound was bad too, something I never thought QUEEN would allow. Brian
May’s solo-ing was eminently self-indulgent and long and BORING! The noise was
excruciating. Freddie was superb but a little lost on the vastness of that stage.
Afterwards was afterwards - a milling throng of liggers – after all I am one now
– and the same old faces. I wonder what all those roadies will be doing when
they’re fifty? Same as me, probably. Saw Sir Joe Lockwood, had a brief exchange
with what appeared a wounded Peter Straker, Leslie Hill from EMI, Harvey
Goldsmith and Sarah Harrison and of course Freddie … it’s enough, isn’t it?
Decided not to go and eat at Meridiana with them all and so drove back to
Homewood and bed …”
The following day, I heard that it had been Freddie’s turn to kick Joe out. I intuited that
David was still there in the wings, waiting. Oh, happy days. But by the twenty-sixth of May, Joe
was back and David was once again let off the hook. Perhaps, rather, the hook was once again
withdrawn. Freddie called to tell David, who was staying with us, of Joe’s return. I don’t think
there was much acrimony left between Freddie and David as my journal doesn’t record any
furious reaction from David to the news. I think by now, after five months of attrition, he was
resigned to … whatever. A couple of days later we drove over to West Overton in Wiltshire in
the afternoon for a garden party at Jim and Claudia Beach’s country house. I remember it was at
the end of Frog Lane. Pleasant afternoon with David and Jill Betteridge of Island Records and
Charles and Caroline Levison, Jim’s colleague from Harbottle and Lewis. Although I don’t
record it, I’m sure that by now Jim was QUEEN’s manager as well as lawyer. And, as David was
still more than useful to Jim, I suppose that’s why we were invited.
But, that same day, whatever emotional famine ached both within and beyond the gates of
my world at Homewood, we feasted on the first of our wonderful strawberries, the first of what
was to be a bountiful summer’s crop. I managed to grow so many cucumbers, I concocted
several recipes for making of them soup, salad and even a hot vegetable accompaniment.
Cocktails, an early evening game of tennis, roast lamb, fresh mint sauce and our own spinach for
dinner and strawberries still warm from the sunny garden which was awash with the strange
scent of Russian vine and resplendent with wygelia blossom and several different sorts of
peonies including a paper-thin, white, tree variety growing opposite our front door.
So, do I paint a picture? What more could I have possibly asked and from whom?
I know it’s probably bad form and I don’t have permission to do so, but I’m going to
reproduce a passage from an article written by Bernard Levin, published in a newspaper in 1978
under the byline which ran: THE CRACKED MIRROR OF OUR TIMES. It says what I could
never have said, then …
“What are the chief characteristics of the false popular culture of our age?
First, it is a culture for the mass rather than for the people, directed to the
ad-man’s market profiles rather than to human beings. Second, it is lazy,
rejecting the agony of artistic creation in favour of the cushioned ease of
pleasing the general by adulterating the caviar. Third, it flatters, adding just
enough information or novelty to make its prospective purchasers think themselves
cleverer than they are. Fourth, it is irredeemably base; in music it elevates
rhythm over melody and mood over feeling, in literature, it encourages lust at
the expense of spirit, in painting it puts colour before expression. Fifth, the
springs of its devising are commercial, not artistic and it comes into being to
please audiences not to assuage in its manufacturers the insatiable creative
hunger of the true artist. Sixth and last, it battens on the cowardice of a world
afraid to show itself composed of individuals, which therefore offers a
collective and mindless affirmation because it dare not return a personal and
articulated denial. This is a world in which ‘elite’ has become an insult,
‘discrimination’ a swear word, ‘quality’ a joke and ‘excellence’ an
incomprehensible concept …”
Was he prescient, or what?
 Chapter Eleven

Never on this bed be lain

Sheets of anger or disdain.
Let only love thy dreamtime claim
‘Neath friendship’s trusting counterpane …

There is a downside to keeping a journal. As well as enabling me to remember what I want

to remember, mine also enables me to remember what I most want to forget. Reading my blather
committed to paper at the time, I was pretty much a screw-up in the summer of 1978. The month
of June saw Ed’s and my lives becoming no longer bound by the perimeter of our pretentious
Park but increasingly woven through with an extra-mural thread. But, more of our wanderings
beyond our pale, later.
It was also the month when two white doves arrived in the park. From whence they came I
knew not and of where they ultimately went, I am similarly ignorant but I noted that they were
there. Ed thought them beautiful. I hadn’t quite worked out my thing about white, then … I think
I found white to be only beautiful and indeed noted in my journal that I was often given to
thoughts of the white-robed Carthusian monks from the priory across the road who must have
wandered over these acres four, five and six centuries ago. At the Dissolution, they must have
felt utterly bereft when they received the royal command to ‘sling their hooks’. Where would a
monk have gone and what would he have done? Worse, in a sexist way, a nun? What else could
many of them have done, having been deposited in their communities, by families who didn’t
want anything to do with them? Were the Somerset byways, post Henry the Eighth’s decree, rife
with bands of mendicant ex-nuns? Having become accustomed to a nice monosexual life, did
they have to go out and marry ploughmen or innkeepers? And what use would have been the
monkish quill or the ability to reflect, divinely? The perils of such white redundancy frequently
assailed my senses as I raked up grass cuttings, dragged water in a two-wheeled reservoir barrow
hither and thither, rebuilt walls and flailed and raged at what I was fast beginning to perceive as
my own unhappy fate.
The weather improved enormously which helped assuage both our own moods and that, it
would seem, of the house itself. At the end of one sunlit afternoon, Ed declared, looking out over
his beautifully manicured acres, that this was what he had envisaged living ‘down South’ would
be all about and said that his dream was all but mirror-perfect. I took great delight in being told
that and for a moment forgot about yesterday’s upsetting argument.
I’m not sure how much I really knew about Ed’s finances. I knew what I was told and
obviously I ran on that information but reading in my journal of Ed’s securing an overdraft,
using Homewood as security, I now wonder … I had introduced Ed to the chartered accountant
Martin Melman who, at Melman Pryke, had looked after Rosie and Paul Samwell-Smith’s
financial affairs and I always sensed he was after more of the same type of client. A bluff, fly-
away, rather theatrical man, he and his wife Jenny were always charmed and charming company
whenever I had met them and Ed too got on very well with both Martin and his firm. Martin
marched Ed up to London and took him to a meeting with the manager of the National
Westminster Bank in The Strand who took on Ed’s spending although not without a more than
cursory inspection of the securities.
Personal and business overdraft facilities were thus made available at an interest rate of, I
note, seven and a half percent in 1978. Our funds thus refurbished, Ed immediately dived in to
even deeper financial waters and went to Bristol and ordered a brand-new dark green Jaguar XJ
3.4 from the Lex Mead dealership in Clifton. Talk about a bee to a honey pot. I too, busy-busy,
went along to Williams’ showroom in Eastville in Bristol and bought a white Austin Mini-Van
for £1780 all-in, on the road. In those days one had to wait for delivery of a car – thirty years
later, cars can hardly be given away. We could hardly wait, such was our anticipation. Boys and
their toys.
Our acquisitions were obviously as symbolic as they were mere purchases. In my van, I
could go where I wanted to go, alone … How Ed must have read this situation I don’t know. My
feeling now is that he didn’t much care and probably had even reckoned on an advantage.
Knowing me knowing him, there must have been an underlying implication that it would be my
workaday van rather than his fancy Jag which would carry the heavier, larger pieces of stock
however much I had prettified the vehicle to disguise its basic utility. By the end of the afternoon
when I collected it, I had carpeted it throughout in a delicate shade of pink Wilton, culled from
remnants of some of the carpeting in the house.
Ed and I were forever having great talks about ‘the future’ and MY position relative to MY
future. Do straight people go in for this sort of thing? Ours was patently not the conversation of
two committed souls bound together in love and life for the henceforward until the hereafter
although in fairness, we were both winging the relationship thing, still not in full possession of
the truth of it all.
The truth was, basically, that we were entirely unsuited and destined to part, sooner rather
than later. I saw warning signs everywhere and we talked about them but neither of us had access
to the how-to-avoid instructions. In unpacking the kit we had mislaid the trouble-shooting
manual. We were perfectly aware of the warning signs but there was no one around yet, no gay
agony aunts, who could advise us to what to do. Neither were we that young any more. I was
thirty-one and Ed was thirty-five. Bit too old to still be lost in the mists of immaturity. Many
straight people could have children of fifteen at our age.
One practical outcome of one of these long talks was that I appear to have agreed to ‘invest’
ten of my fourteen thousand saved-up pounds into Ed’s business and that he would give me an
income. After having been initially tempted, Ed vacillated about the new freedom his overdraft
brought him and initially cancelled the Jaguar only to re-order another which he also cancelled in
favour of a white Daimler from the Hartwell dealership where he found that he could secure a
better deal after negotiating a higher offer on his Volvo. He was nothing if not a hard-nosed
businessman although in the end he paid £10,300 for his new Daimler, a ‘tidy’ sum in those
days. These days (2005) a similar car would be over £60,000 and the price of a Daimler
astronomical, since the marque has just been re-introduced, although Jaguar Cars is now a
liability and owned by Ford of America. Thus, as these purchases evolved, it became painfully
obvious to me that Ed had no real need for my money to be invested in his business. Had he
wanted extra money, there was plainly quite enough of it for him to go out and buy an expensive
car.
 And quite what an untidy sum would have been, I don’t know but I realise now, looking
squarely into my driving mirror, that in the white theory of things, we not only had two white
doves gracing the park, we had two white cars gracing the drive. White on white and … And we
had a visiting white cat! Dear God, how the ides were convening.
My acquiescence in Ed’s business proposal seems to have been predicated on his decision to
concentrate on making the ground floor of the house his antiques trading centre. I recorded my
misgivings about this intention but then, for whatever I knew, this might have been part of the
arrangement agreed upon with the bank manager to enable the overdraft. I know said bank
manager arrived one day and that I and our guests, Cherry Brown and Rodney North were
instructed to be absent. Surprisingly, I appear to have agreed to make myself scarce although I
find it hard to believe that I would have done so without at least a gesture. Surely the bank
manager wasn’t blind? Surely he would have realised that the most basic maintenance of a house
like Homewood could never have been achieved without at least two staff, one in the house and
one in the garden. I was the two-in-one and came not only for free but paying my own salary and
upkeep! In the event, on the appointed day, said bank manager, a very eager man in my opinion,
arrived an hour-and-a-half early and found me still preparing his lunch, Rodney still asleep in
bed and Cherry in chic deshabille, wandering across the lawns surrounded by her red setters like
a half-asleep Diana with henna-red hounds. I remember hoping, most uncharitably, that Ed and
the bank manager might choke on their lunch as we, damp dogs’n’all, drove away for our
enforced exeat, crammed uncomfortably into my little van.
 David Minns, Straker, Cherry Brown
During the month of June, our long-term feline lodger proved a great worry. Maybe the
curse of ‘the white thing’ worked out immediately on poor Tabitha. Whilst Rufus continued hale
and was developing her hunting instincts to massacre proportions, Tabitha began to decline her
food and water and became greatly debilitated in a very short time as dehydration in cats has fast
and devastating results. It is awful when one’s own pet is ill but doubly so when the animal is not
yours. What it must be like being in loco parentis for a child, I prefer not to even contemplate.
 There had been no word from Peter Wood and so, unable to have his confirmation as to our
course of action, we took Tabitha to see Mr Chivers, the vet who lived at Combe Down who
examined her, injected her and told us to take her home. Tabitha was incensed when the
thermometer was stuck into the royal rectum and outraged when the hypodermic sank into what
minimal flesh she carried on her shoulder. She continued very poorly over the next few days and
there seemed nothing more that the vet could do. I was really upset and felt peculiarly helpless as
I had it fixed in my mind that the poor little thing, only a handful of skin and bones beneath the
deceptive fur coat, was dying.
Well, of course, little beast … She did survive but not before she had thoroughly pushed
every emotional button I had. I sat with her for hours, willing her to survive. Nowhere could I
contact Peter Wood. I called Roy Roberts at Granada television, Tim Curry in New York and
every number I had for his ‘boys’ whom I could only presume were travelling with him. The
fabric of Peter’s current love life was beginning to become clear. Nick Thomson, one of the
‘boys’, finally returned one of my fevered messages to say that Peter had had car trouble in Italy.
Nick was a man of few words, unlike his partner-in-Peter, the loquacious American, Chuck
whose surname I never knew although I have since noticed that, to Americans, surnames on
superficial acquaintance often seem to matter little. Anyway, whether Nick’s information was
supposed to put cat trouble in Bath into the perspective of priority vis a vis car trouble in Italy I
don’t know but I believe I was quite terse and said rather waspishly that I would be very relieved
when Tabitha could be collected in a few days to be reunited with her ménage a trois.
Thus, off to Batcombe Tabitha went, as did we a few days later only to find that Chuck had
gone home. He’d quit, vamoosed, thrown in the towel … Meeting Peter and his ‘boys’ was my
first and only brush with such a household and I observed thus: “Apparently Nick had never
liked Chuck. Are we surprised? After all, why did they have to share Peter? Only
because Peter wanted it and Peter is the moving force, the apex of the triangle
which had stood up instead of lying down. The theory of it all was wonderfully
grown-up and contemporary but the practice proved a different kettle of fish from
the one of purely poached sea-trout, garnished with the most delicate of herbs
dropped from the fingers of the master-palated conoisseur of the human drama, on
or offstage. Instead, what Peter seems to have ended up with is a shark in a pot
and there’s no answer to that thrashing mayhem than to allow it back into the
sea.” I have since heard of similar ambitious households but I have never encountered one and
thus they remain as myths yet to be exploded. Indeed, Ed thought he could make a fair stab at it
but that’s to come.
Although Bryan Forbes had filmed his iconic THE STEPFORD WIVES in 1975/76, I note
that the film was not released until summer of 1978. It was with huge pride and pleasure that I
read Alun Brien, the then film critic in THE SUNDAY TIMES, who declared the film to be
Bryan’s “… most accomplished film so far.” I was equally proud of and pleased for Kenny
Everett too, whose new television show first aired during the July of this long, hot summer. It
was broadcast to great acclaim and showed that this diversely talented man had achieved yet
another milestone accolade in what was to be a cruelly short career.
We seem to have left Homewood only twice that month. Once we went to Scotland to see
what there was to buy although it seemed that prices had been rising incredibly quickly and that
dealers and buyers arriving from ‘down south’ were unable to buy anything on which they could
make a profit to ‘pay the petrol’, as Ed would say, and thus validate the journey. It was one of
the last times I went back to Scotland with Ed. Indeed there were to be few more journeys we
would make together to London to events like Freddie Mercury’s Sunday afternoon ‘Short
Shorts’ summer party at Stafford Terrace in Kensington. I noted that I didn’t care for the
occasion for which I arrived far too early. I hate being early.
But what an intimate little shriek of madness the party was -All the Mercurial lovers were in
attendance both past, present and – who knows – future? Eric Hall, Malcolm Grey, David Minns,
Peter Place, Joe Fanelli and of course mysterious Mary. Peter Wood’s stab at a ménage a trois
rather paled when set against Freddie’s excessive ambitions. But then he had grown up in
Zanzibar – maybe tales heard in childhood of a Sultan’s harem had rather gone to his head?
Freddie and Dais - It’s Never Too Late, Dear
Daisy Tells It Like It Was
Neil Carter, Clodagh Wallace, Dais, Straker, Stephen Allison, Mike and Wendy Allison
Freddie focuses
 However, it was all too much for a man (me) who was proving most inept at coping with
even one lover and thus the day’s celebrations continued without me. My day was made even
less enjoyable when I called round to see Sarah Forbes at Elm Place. She announced that she had
decided to have an affair with Howard Malin, producer of Derek Jarman’s film JUBILEE and
one of that maestro’s inner coterie. Malin, perfectly affable and more than charming, was also
more than gay; Howard Malin was beyond gay and certainly, in Sarah’s context, beyond my
comprehension. Reid and Malin – these were obviously super-gays, uber-buggers who could still
be choosers. This really was cutting edge societal innovation.
My curmudgeonliness, suspicion and grubby dog-in-the-manger attitude towards my
London friends was of course unforgivable. So I should be so lucky to even have friends at all,
let alone these wildly romantic and glamorous beings in the stratosphere of the western world’s
café society … What WAS I trying to prove to myself? Certainly nothing to them who must have
thought me bewildering if not utterly horrid.
In my confused mind, this London Sunday was counter-pointed by Ed’s mother’s birthday
party a few days later on July 4th, America’s birthday too. The whole family of Tippets came as
well as a couple of neighbours, Mrs Hope and Mrs Mitchell and we had a lovely time with
home-grown saladings of cucumbers, lettuces, radishes and tomatoes. I noted that I thought
myself happier that day than Jan Murray, whose birthday it was: “The final menu was carrot
and mint soup with my own bread rolls, cold beef and chicken with meatloaf and
hot new potatoes, apple and raspberry crumble and fresh strawberries with cream
and ice-cream and home-made lemonade for the non-alkies. Ed had polished the
candelabra and the cutlery and on the table were bowls of pink roses and bunny-
lugs …”
What was I trying to be? A sort of changeling domestic goddess? I liked Jan Murray even
less than I thought I liked my old London friends. What did I think I was starring in? A touring
version of a gay Stepford, an unmade Greer Garson weepie with a script by Barbara Cartland,
costumes by Laura Ashley and a cast of yokelly weirdos culled from whatever THE ARCHERS
couldn’t accommodate?
So, to get a little dirt on my hands and to gutter things up a bit – or down – I don’t record the
first time we changed our evening drinking destination of the Garrick’s Head in Bath for a trip to
The Elephant pub in Bristol’s St Nicholas’ Street but find this pub we did. We thought it a rather
dead-and-alive place and soon repaired to the gay nightclub and drinking bar across the road
called, reassuringly, THE OASIS. What is an oasis but a haven in a desert? For a time, it was.
The club was in a cellar. Maybe two cellars. There was a rinkydink bar where the young,
blond and sulkily available James Carter worked most nights as senior barman to a junior by the
name of David and a slight Portuguese by the name of Jacques. These three also worked with an
elderly, diminutive human Rottweiler, Florence Courtice, who held court in the club on
weekends and would pull you a pint if she liked the look of you. If she didn’t, you were ignored.
And incidentally, Flo, you were right - It really IS a drunken man who speaks his sober mind …
There was a small and therefore conveniently intimate dance floor and on that first night
when Ed and I descended that rickety staircase, whoever was DJ was still playing DON’T GO
BREAKING MY HEART, two years after its time which, of course, thrilled me and buttressed
my special opinion of myself which, lately, I had been giving a frightful thrashing.
To complete the catalogue of the club’s facilities, there was the usual set of cruisy and
usually very busy toilets, the obligatory ‘Female’ door being the one most used by those wishing
a respectable and very temporary privacy. The whole was presided over by Richard Sweet, a tall
and engagingly chatty ‘mine host’ whose lover, the aforementioned small and swarthy
Portuguese by the name of Jacques, were to become frequent visitors to Homewood. Of our first
visit to The Oasis, I wrote: “Anyway, good foundations are being built, based on
caution and awareness. Oh, God, I do hope we’re building good foundations …”
We weren’t. We were building the beginnings of our own personal cataclysm although the
sexual opportunities which the club afforded assuaged the marital itch and several of the club’s
regular clientele were to prove satisfactory fair-weather friends in the shorter term.
 Freddie Onstage

Freddie, Queen of Tarts

Freddie Inside Zandra Rhodes White Shirt
 Chapter Twelve

I am not a Christian man, nor follow any

marching band
But neither yet am I Muslim, I am not ruled
by guilt or sin.
I’m not a Jew and no Hindu nor do I fit a
pagan shoe
I’m neither cultist nor Parsee, nor
Confucian devotee
I am no more than what I am, spawn of a
scheme no hand began.

Whether it was in the month of July that the vicar came to call, I am not sure, but come to
call he did. I was hoeing the weeds on the drive when I saw him wander through the gates. I
didn’t ask him in. I remarked that his visit was a little late, in fact some months late. Not that we
were his sort of parishioner but he wasn’t to know that. I observed that we could have easily fled
to the arms of Scientology or Catholicism in the months which had expired since our arrival. I
hope I sent him away with a flea in his ear. His visit had become even more insulting for every
week he had postponed it. Compounded insult, added cumulatively to the initial injury. I have a
feeling that other voices than God’s had whispered in his ear that he might call. I sense that the
dear Tippett family might have pointed out that his recalcitrance was not only inopportune but
niggardly and ill-mannered. I don’t think the word ‘homophobic’ was in common currency in
those days but whether his delayed call was for that reason, there remained in residence at
Homewood an elderly lady who for all he knew might have been declining in a state of spiritual
kidnap.
As far as I can remember, I wrote nothing except my journal in the course of that flaming
summer. DEAD AND FALLEN HORSES lay where their inspiration had been gleaned – on the
cobble stones of an only distantly remembered time. Presently, the atmosphere in our own
cloistered homo-bucolic world improved little. Ed’s mother was obviously very unhappy. One
day, I had enquired whether she would feel more secure if we could install a telephone by her
bed in her room, only to be regaled with the riposte: “I don’t give a damn!” She was worried
about her future, concerned as to her security and I can’t really blame her for being aggressive. I
had to remember that it was her money that Ed had appropriated to complete his purchase of
Homewood and that for all intents and purposes, she was elderly, defenceless and financially
compromised.
Once a thought enters one’s head, if not dismissed, it wriggles like a worm, irritatingly and
perniciously and my thought of the possibility of leaving Ed and Homewood became more
insidious and insistent. The voices of distraction nattered non-stop in my head. “… I learned a
great human truth today, namely that there is no POINT to life – on this mortal
coil. There is no reason for there to be any end-product at all and that is why
there is no point in worrying about anything. Of late, I’ve been wanting to up-
sticks and go, wandering off like an Indian pulling his travois or a gypsy in his
caravan. But I haven’t gone – why not? I suppose it’s because I know that there
really isn’t any point in moving on. Just because my spirit cries out and my
whims decree a move, that is not sufficient reason to heed and go. My prison is
of my own making and walls and bars of that kind are therefore illusion. I’m NOT
in prison. Rodney North (Cherry Brown’s partner) was in prison. I merely THINK I’m
in prison … I only THINK I would be happier somewhere else … So, here I sit on
this magnificent terrace, basking in the joyful sunshine, smelling the scent of a
parched but undaunted honeysuckle mixed with that of an aromatic tea rose behind
me on the wall of the house, wondering about what and why the hell … Why do we
get into such a twist about ourselves?”
Much later in life, I read an aphorism attributed to I’ve forgotten who: “If we weren’t so
hung up on being happy, we’d have a pretty good time.”
Ed thought me verging on the insane at about this time in our lives together and told me so.
I’m glad I never took any notice. I’ve been told of my insanity by other lovers and those close to
me since and had I believed them, I would indeed have been tempted to be insane. I have noticed
that outbursts of temper, when countered by a return outburst of temper are often fended off with
accusations of insanity. “You’re mad!” How often have we each heard that? I have also
remarked that those hurling the accusations are often ignorant of or at least immune to their own
behaviour, the import of their own words and comportment and thus frightened by those of
others. But, be that as it may. I am still at large in the community and can only conclude that my
‘insanity’ as such is, if not entirely containable, at least sufficiently insignificant to allow me to
avoid being ‘committed’. A friend tells me that the word ‘sectioned’ is now employed to
describe the process of being forcibly removed from society.
The one conclusion I had come to in my life with Ed Murray was that I realised that I was
caught between two worlds, the past and the future and that the present, which I inhabited,
served not as the necessary transition but as a kind of boggy quicksand in which I was
floundering, unable to make any way whatsoever, either forwards or back and in which I was
obviously not going to be permitted to drown. I had torn myself from the past and stumbled into
the present.
Such is one of the perils not only of being an accidentalist but of acting without first putting
an emotional reaction through an intellectual channel. I have since learned a very little of this art
although it is as imperfect a one as the science of medicine or psychology itself. One night Ed
and I even went as far as Bournemouth, to see what the southern horizon might furnish in the
way of society and the only person I met was the actor and model, George Bond, in town for the
weekend and all we talked of for an hour at least was ‘the old days’. He had been Mick Hannah’s
contemporary, Graham Rogers’ too and had been very good friends with Mark Dotteridge, the
other of my close friends who had been killed in the Turkish Airlines disaster in 1973.
I never went back to Bournemouth but I did return repeatedly to THE OASIS in Bristol. Its
lure drew both Ed and I more and more frequently.
Meeting Roger Clifford there one evening also highlighted the backwards perspective,
although, unlike the Bournemouth experience, it didn’t put me off The Oasis. In his heyday,
Roger had been the West End’s top theatrical and personal publicist and had employed David
Minns for several years. Since venturing into the world of theatre production, his projects had
failed and he had been recently declared bankrupt and in 1978 was working as assistant to John
Gale, another West End Producer. He came to Homewood several times as he frequently visited
his mother, recently hospitalised in Bristol, which was his home town. After our meeting again in
1978, I lost touch with him for a few years and next saw him in Los Angeles, at Barry Krost’s
house where my future partner and I had been invited for dinner. Roger was all but unemployed,
kept afloat by Barry’s using him as cook/butler and putting other occasional work his way. I
didn’t see him again. He died of Aids in the cruel, late nineteen-eighties, I believe.
THE OASIS also added other names to our social directory, most significantly Robert
Thomas and Robert Cork. The former, the Welshman Robert, was a wild and handsome
character, of the romantic, gypsy variety who had boxed cleverly with several nefarious
endeavours over the years after having been a social worker in Birmingham for some time. He
was a sort of peripheral marginal criminal. A wide boy. In the forties and fifties he would have
been called a spiv. Pornography and property of doubtful, certainly disputable, ownership were
the admitted arenas in which he had dabbled. I remember hoping that he had never had to do
with Boys’ Homes. Disastrous!
He was currently engaged in learning about the antiques business although it was the money
to be earned not the joy of handling the goods which motivated him. He had little or no
background in the arts, little or no aptitude for discerning quality, age or materials and was a
little too old to be able to take such a cargo on board. But he knew about turning a buck and he
saw in Ed and I the avenue of respectability which he fancied might further his operations. Ed
had both money and knowledge as well as artistic appreciation and taste. Robert knew he could
make all these qualities work in his own interests.
Other than his commercial aspects, Robert Thomas was indisputably attractive, a greedy,
venal and highly sexual man whose social and sexual morals were as conveniently flexible as his
business values. Although Robert Thomas lived in Bristol, his boyfriend, a young and, in those
days, apparently rather silly young man called Christopher Wiltshire, worked in Cardiff. They
got together at weekends. I have to add that even in those days before we had been made ultra-
aware of the ages of our sexual partners, Christopher, at seventeen, was dangerously underage.
However, Robert was more than used to flying close to the wind and, as a social worker, had
been well-versed in working with the young.
Robert Cork was altogether different. Tall and blond, good-looking, well-made and boyishly
engaging, he was an assistant editor on the Bristol Evening Post and had his sights set on a
higher plane of existence and particularly working in London. Indeed he eventually got a job on
one of the London Evening papers. I think he initially took to me because of what he perceived
were my ‘connections’ in the celebrity trade. This Robert also had a boyfriend, a real life live-in
boyfriend called Roger MacNichol who was an air steward and who was, therefore, often away a
lot from their comfortable Bristol flat.
What I didn’t know at the beginning of our acquaintance but what I discovered later was that
when Christopher and Roger respectively were away from home and hearth, Robert and Robert
were very busy exchanging bodily fluids. Such discoveries always alarm me. Not only am I
wrong-footed, made forever aware that I have to watch what I say - twice over in this case - but I
was left forever wondering what I had said about Robert Thomas to Robert Cork - and vice versa
- and what pillow talk they might have snatched in between their stolen bouts of pleasure. To
compound my uncertainty, I was to further discover that Robert T was exchanging bodily fluids
with pretty much anyone in South Wales and the wider West Country who boasted a pulse.
However it was this ultra-promiscuous and entirely indiscriminate Robert Thomas and the
very young Christopher Wiltshire who figured significantly in one of July’s cloudier moments.
Tim Curry had re-appeared in our lives, having finished his album with Bob Ezrin and having
played several well-received gigs in California to promote his work. I really liked Tim’s first
album for A and M Records.
Ed’s attitude to the re-appearance of Tim Curry had been marred by a telephone call from
Bob Ezrin himself. Why had we been so honoured? Easy: he wanted to send his kids to stay with
us for the summer and was prepared to pay us for the trouble. I was rather flattered and would
have probably agreed to the idea but Ed went ballistic and took huge offence, furious at having
been put on the spot and painfully embarrassed at being the one to have to say ‘No’. It was a
reaction I couldn’t understand and was never able to work out quite why he should have taken
Ezrin’s innocent enquiry as such an insult. Hey ho.
Tim eventually arrived with David Minns, looking slimmer, fitter and with a more charged
attitude towards his work than I had seen him exhibit for some time. That evening, we all went
into Bristol and enjoyed an evening at The Oasis and came back to sleep the sleep of the just. We
had invited Robert Thomas and the boyfriend to come over to supper the following evening and
thus we woke to enjoy a Saturday filled with gardening, shopping in Bath and cooking the
dinner. Homewood and its summer park and gardens looked ravishing as we sat down and
enjoyed a really lovely dinner.
Until … Until it all went pear-shaped and suddenly everything, I mean everything turned
sour. What followed was what my editor at Sanctuary books would not allow me to include in
my ROCKY HORROR book for fear that Tim Curry would sue. Now, as my own publisher, I
say defiantly what I wished I could have effected then: “Bring it on!” In my un-humble opinion,
people who behave this badly don’t deserve their privacy respected.
The furore began just before dinner by Tim complaining bitterly about ‘being recognised’.
He launched into his neurotic irritation first with Ed and then later with me. It was more than
irritation. Tim was raving. Looking back, I might have detected the presence of drugs but I was
unaware that Tim involved himself in recreational drug-taking although fewer months than he
had spent in and around the California music business had been known to have worked wonders
for many a drug virgin. Trying to maintain the peace, I asked if he was referring to anything that
might have happened to him last night at The Oasis, although I reminded myself that it had been
Tim himself who had suggested on the telephone that we all might “behave a little badly in
Bristol” one night. To Ed, he vociferously directed the instruction that no one should ever make
direct reference to his being gay and especially “… not in front of an antique dealer I don’t even
know and a shop assistant from Cardiff!” Tim was obviously more than prepared to burn bridges
that night.
Well, his un-containable outburst rather put the knockers on our lovely dinner and the
evening declined accordingly. We all slunk away from the occasion. Robert and Chris went back
to Bristol and all in the household went to bed. Sunday passed even more trickily. Ed was so
furious with Tim that he refused to even be in the same room. Tim refused to even acknowledge
my parents who arrived for a couple of hours in the afternoon to help me hang some curtains and
to collect some furniture I had given to my sister. I cooked dinner for us all and after we had
eaten, I drove Tim into Bath to catch his train. He turned very quickly on his heel as he walked
away to the platform, never turning round to wave or beam that delicious beaming smile. I knew
it was to be a while before we would see him again and to tell truth, I was relieved. When friends
cause each other that kind of distress, it’s best to turn off the gas and give the stew to the cat.
 Whether I apologised to Robert Thomas for Tim’s outburst when we saw him on Monday at
George Willis’s farm in Ty Coch Lane in Cwm Bran, I have forgotten but he got rather better out
of me than a mere apology by managing to convince me that to look after two Welsh horses in
our paddocks would not be any problem, that basically horses look after themselves and, well …
I had been having these Stubbsian fantasies envisioning horses swishing their tails beneath our
park’s spreading trees and I succumbed and bought two for the ridiculous price of £1000. Robert
had long-ago worked out that I was a probable ‘mark’ and indeed I fairly fell onto his baited
hook.
I knew not the slightest thing about any part of any horse of any description but I was swept
along on the crest of the moment and the horses duly arrived a few days later. Despite the
priceless aesthetic of seeing them installed and the occasional pleasure when someone rode them,
Beckie and Penny were never merely a problem. From the moment they arrived, having them
became a nightmare.
The expense was never-ending, from vet’s and blacksmith’s bills to the purchase of tack and
saddlery to the supply and storage of hay and feed … I had bought them in the fond belief that,
like sheep in New Zealand, they might turn out to be self-financing lawnmowers. I couldn’t have
been more wrong; I discovered that the fields weren’t big enough for them and that they could
have mown for the county; their stabling was essential when the cold weather came, even though
Robert-the-Horse had assured me that for most of the winter they could live outside; their feed
needs such as hay and horse nuts and water – twice daily at least and constant access to water in
hot weather – would run me ragged. I let these gracious and magnificent animals down not
through inability but through arrogance and ignorance and I apologise to their souls from the
depths of my being for betraying their silent trust.
But the Tippetts girls liked them and rode them as often as they could and a girl called Sarah
Lucas from the village wanted them so badly I thought she was going to horse-nap them. I wish
she had … I wish they had jumped the fences and galloped all the way back to Wales over the
Severn Bridge or swum the Bristol Channel. But every morning when I opened my curtains and
looked down over the park, there they were. Hungry. And looking at me.
The remainder of that summer at Homewood was overshadowed by a series of events which
I had seen coming but was nevertheless overtaken by when they happened. It wasn’t so much the
core of the matter which I found upsetting; that I could cope with. It was the way other people
behaved which I found incomprehensibly silly and, ultimately, hurtful. The craziness began
when Sarah Forbes rang one day to tell me that John Reid had asked to marry her and that she
had agreed. Indeed, the news broke the following day in the newspapers and the Nigel
Dempsters and the William Hickeys of the world began a field day – open season on the Forbes-
Reids and anything to do with them. It was a story which ran and ran, for months and which, in
some quarters, runs to this day …
It all began with the premiere for INTERNATIONAL VELVET for which we were invited
to buy tickets at £5 each. In the end there were only £10 tickets left and even though I had
enjoyed working on the movie, I thought that a bit steep to see the final product which I would
soon be able to see at a local cinema for a pound and so I didn’t go. However, Sarah was in a
huge dilemma about whether to go with Howard Malin or not. In the event, she didn’t have to
decide because her parents decided for her and suggested that John Reid escort her. Was he
regarded as the lesser of two evils? Well, from that point it seems the play unravelled, the bowler
let go of the ball and we stood back and waited to see how many pins would go down in the
alley. And in the neighbouring alleys.
I was taken aback but, after due reflection, perfectly prepared to believe that this odd but
otherwise well-matched couple might make a go of it and if their marriage pushed a bit of
envelope, all well and good. I wished them well. Sarah’s parents, however, were - to me -
incomprehensibly thrilled and seemed to go along with the idea of a promiscuously gay man, a
recreational drug-user par excellence, an at-best turbulent tycoon marry their eldest daughter.
On a practical level, although John had enjoyed a much publicised encounter with Barbara
Windsor and who obviously knew where a lady’s moving parts were garaged, would he be able
to eschew the demands of the pink part of his libido in favour of solely remaining obedient to the
breeding bit? For a moment, I fancied that this practical aspect of the couple’s future had been
worked out, that they had discussed in full their understanding of each other’s proclivities how
they were going to manage this part of their marriage. But I was wrong and was so proved when
Reid’s pony fell at the first fence. But of that, more in a tick …
I’m rather glad I decided not to go to the film premiere. On the afternoon of the event, Elton,
always more the Forbes parents’ favourite of the gay couple who had moved to Virginia Water at
the beginning of the decade, announced that ‘under the circumstances’ he would not be
attending. Ouch. That must have hurt. It also sent a dedicated signal to the happy couple that the
source of John Reid’s income was decidedly compromised and that trouble was most definitely
afoot. Elton’s was a typical, stampy-stampy tantrum reaction from this very spoiled man, a
strategy he had deployed many times before. No one, except John Reid himself, seemed to take
much notice and despite the ‘It should’ve been me!’ outburst from Elton, churches were being
booked, vicars engaged and wedding invitations were being printed even as Captain Fantastic’s
ire finally took form and winged its way to Reid’s in-tray.
The message on the card read: “You’re sacked.” Finally. Ouch. Probably for the first time in
the whole affair, John Reid paused for real thought. What he had been many times threatened
with had finally happened. Reid had already been replaced as QUEEN’s manager and so with no
room to manoeuvre, there was not a lot of future in being Elton John’s ex-manager as well.
Although the reviews for INTERNATIONAL VELVET in England did not set the pages of
cinema history alight, Bryan and Nanette were soon off on a whirlwind promotional tour taking
them first to America and away from the cauldron of complex brouhaha beneath which the
flames they themselves had fanned were beginning to threaten the entire neighbourhood.
Obviously, the scheduled worldwide publicity junket arranged for the film precluded the Forbes
parents’ better judgement to remain behind as the wedding juggernaut threatened to grind to a
halt.
A couple of days after the premiere, Ed and I went up to London one evening to have dinner
with the happy couple - I mean Reid and Sarah - who didn’t seem as happy as I had thought they
might be. Well, correction. I was uneasy at first, seeing them ‘together’ but Sarah was obviously
happy, although she was as a fish out of water in the Montpellier Square drawing room where I
could not but help remember parties with male strippers and as much puff and blow that you
could fit onto a vanity mirror.
However, more telling was John’s comportment. Whereas Ed felt entirely uncomfortable -
maybe it was something only a Scot could sense about another Scot - I could tell Reid was being
defensive despite his outward jolliness. I could tell from long experience when John’s interest
had waned in a project. I remembered his body language and demeanour when needing to
discuss with him the needs of a client whom he had signed for management on some whim or the
other and in whose career he had long lost interest. He could hardly look his interlocuter in the
face or meet their eyes. He was in many ways a very simple man to read. Ha ha! To Reid! After
playing us David Essex’s soon-to-be-released new single from EVITA, he announced that dinner
plans had changed, surprise, surprise … Ed and I were to take Sarah to Provan’s for supper
where reservations had already been made and where I was to ‘sign’, whilst Reid had to go out
for a meeting with Eric Hall. Remember Eric? Executive promotional supremo at EMI Records
and the, later, monsta-monsta, cigar-chomping football agent-to-be? Eric has always asserted that
he had had an affair with Freddie Mercury. At least, a dalliance. It was a jig-saw piece of
bragadoccio that I could never make fit and frankly never believed it. I think, now, perhaps I
should have done. I’ve bedded some pigs too, in my time.
We all bade each other au revoir and air-kissed and hugged appropriately, although how
SHOULD one hug or air-kiss an once fuck buddy about to breed with your best friend and
confidante and someone you had yourself loved to no end? I had promised Sarah that I would
take on a half-grown cat which she had rescued and which lived at Elm Place. Now that she was
no longer to be living in her mother’s town house, the cat had to be re-homed. I had met Monty
once and had loved him. He had six toes. Yes, yes … I know, I already had Ed’s mother, one cat,
six hens and two galumphing great horses? But I had read that six-toed cats were always thought
to be witches’ familiars and I fancied that I needed a little help, however arcane. I vaguely
thought that it was somehow meant that I should take on Monty.
And so, Sarah and Ed and I had our dinner and we called in at Elm Place afterwards for me
to collect Monty before driving blearily and wearily back to Homewood. Monty, like Rufus, also
took to country life as though to the manor born and although an outside cat, remained
affectionate and loyal and with bigger feet than I have since seen on any cat, feet that I was later
to discover sported not six toes but seven! Rufus retreated to Jan’s sitting room and rarely
emerged.
The next day, Sunday, Sarah called. Her sky had fallen in. Reid had returned home, drunk,
from his ‘business’ dinner with ‘a boy’. There isn’t even a need to print his name although for
‘the boy’ to have returned with John at all to a house where a newly engaged fiancée was waiting
for her love was a pretty shameful act and calls into question whether it was not a stage-managed
operation fallen into by Reid himself to begin the process of extricating himself from a situation
which he couldn’t handle and didn’t want. Strangely, Sarah said she could cope with ‘the boy’
and, presumably, the sex thing … I didn’t believe her and I know she didn’t believe herself. I had
to remind myself that she was only barely eighteen. She was barely even of age to legally marry
and certainly, despite her worldliness, of no age at all to understand the complex situation into
which she had been drawn. But against ignorance and therefore the lack of the ability to assess
and judge, it appears the world has found no legal way either before this date or since to ensure
that the ignorant are protected from themselves.
I tried to imagine her waiting for Reid to wake up. What a long night and even longer
morning must she have endured? I pictured her in Montpellier Square looking out of those long
first floor windows onto the bustling square outside, feeling alone and trampled and used and I
knew that this was one situation she was going to have to merely wait out. She called later in the
day to say that she and John had talked and that she thought ‘things’ might work out and that
they had both been invited to a party at Elton’s house that night. Talk about contradictory signals
… Had Elton and John already talked and come to an agreement that Sarah would be consigned
to history?
At a quarter-past-one the following morning, the telephone rang. God, how I hate telephones
ringing in the middle of the night Such rude disturbance always heralds nothing less than a death
or a major disaster. My journal entry is best quoted;
Sarah telephoned “ … in floods of tears. Reid had just, as far as I could make
out, just called the whole thing off. What could I say except ‘Keep calm, I’m on
my way’. I jumped into my little van but hadn’t enough petrol and could find none
in Bath to get me started down the motorway on which, in those days, there was
only one gas station at Membury. I had to call her from a Bath telephone box. She
seemed calmer after the third ‘phone call and had decided to go to Los Angeles to
be with her parents who were on the American leg of their INTERNATIONAL VELVET
promotional tour. Apparently Reid’s ‘excuse’ had been that a) when the money ran
out so would Sarah and b) that all his friends are against it and c) that he
can’t face the rigmarole of a conventional wedding such as the one being planned
and d) that Elton is kicking him out of every business association and he can’t
face it … Let’s all face it, he just doesn’t WANT to marry, to ‘go straight’, at
all- Now all he wants to do – with those reasons – is to force Sarah into pulling
out. She, quite rightly, can’t face ‘it’ either and just wants to leave town and
leave him holding the microphone to make all the announcements of the calling-
off. I just pray they don’t call the calling-off off …”
Sarah left London the next day on the two o’clock flight to Los Angeles but only after she
had done a very, more-than, decent thing and told Reid face-to-face that she was leaving. She
stayed away a couple of weeks and returned quiet, bruised and battered but brave. She has
always been brave. I think she returned a little wiser too although wisdom is a commodity which
can only be forged in adversity and tested later.
Whilst she was away, in my little world, the conversion of the coach house at Homewood
was completed. The plan for an antiques business in the ground floor rooms had thus been
commuted to an antiques business in the coach house. The electrical expertise of Rodney North
and my dear father’s experience had helped Ed with the completion of the work although I
detected no major effort or even intent on Ed’s part put into plans for advertising the project or
informing potential customers. Or organising the stock or making a display. Or anything.
Instead we went to a major local country house sale at the home occupied for decades by the
Awdrey family near Warminster and rummaged through piles of National Geographics and
trunksful of old tennis rackets, the residue of lives long-lived in one place. I should imagine it
was one of the last country house sales ever held in situ. I wonder if there had been a country
house sale at Homewood when the last of the Daveys sold up? The world was wising up as fast
as young Sarah Forbes had had to. Henceforth, the dross of a house’s contents would be sorted
through and disposed of to house clearance totters and the ‘best’ bits hived off to achieve major
saleroom prices in major salerooms. The gentle world of the gentleman was disappearing,
drowning, not waving … Hey ho and so much for a lifetime of pastimes and hobbies, the
concomitant collections of magazines, their letter-box arrivals once so anticipated, their contents
devoured with all the delectation of a connoisseur savouring a just-opened bottle of Chateau
d’Yquem and yet, decades later, not even to be accorded the dignity of featuring in the weekly
recycling of empty bottles of supermarket plonk.
Unlike me, Ed was only sentimental about a more specific agendum. As far as Ed was
concerned, the message appeared to be: When in doubt, keep spending and at any sale, Raphael
Antiques would bid like a banshee …
What a month. Friday 18th August, the day after Sarah returned from California to face her
future and her past. “Had a couple of long conversations with Sarah both before and
after her lunch with John. In short, the wedding, as such, is off and I imagine
‘the relationship’ too although, as Sarah says, she still loves him and, in his
own way and next to himself, he probably loves her. But theirs is a relationship
of the future. There are no words to describe what they want, both for themselves
and for each other – no weddings, no engagements, none of the social formal
frippery involved in being ‘ordinary’. These people, our people, are not
ordinary. We are special, different, and have to abide by our own rules,
individual strictly personal codes of values, behaviour and morality. We are all
sort-of-outsiders and long may we remain so. However, for Sarah who is still so
young, the realisation of that isolated individuality, that daily loss of
innocence involved in growing up, is hard to take and painful to the heart. If
one can liken the process to sculpting – a large, square block of marble or
stone, perfect in its potential, is gradually chipped, coaxed and hammered and
then polished into a unique object of beauty and form. It has taken a lot of love
to create, it has gone through untidy, awkward periods when the sculptor had
beaten his temples with his dusty hands in desperation that the work will never
be finished. We are all such sculptures and God’s hand is the chisel – we cannot
see it working but it is there nevertheless …”
I was left wondering what might have happened two years ago had I told Elton that I would
certainly consider coming to work for him and leaving John? I wondered if Elton always had it
on his mind that he wanted to leave John’s aegis and guidance and thus resolve their
undetermined love life? However much Elton may have railed and reacted and promised
marriage to Melanie Green as a … what? A yah-boo-sucks, thumbing of the nose to Reid’s
rebellion? Yeah, yeah. What was being proved here? Or attempting to be proved? Petulent
childish gestures and ripostes in a slew of bad behaviour such that had it happened in a primary
school playground it would have been faintly comprehensible. As adults conducting their lives?
These men should have had their licenses to masculinity revoked.
I knew then that I had made the right decision to leave the employment of John Reid and,
thus, the music business. I had known and had just had it confirmed, that I wouldn’t have stood
an earthly chance in the happiness stakes and certainly way less of a chance than that afforded
Sarah who had to suffer the physical and psychological and social pain of dragging herself,
bleeding, away from their altar to have her wounds bound by those who might have known
better.
And it wasn’t over yet … Poor Melanie. What an introduction, a baptism by fire, to the cut
and thrust of a world in which she later excelled. In another country. La La Land. Far away in
sunny, happy California, that well-known slide area.
 Chapter Thirteen

“The trouble about getting there, is that when

you get there, there is no there, there …”
DOROTHY PARKER

“These are the balmy days with no regrets – these are the summers upon which
we shall look back with pure delight when we are old, when we cannot carry heavy
loads, when our feeble fingers are stiffened with arthritis, our hair greyed or
fallen out, our eyes bespectacled and hazy with tears of helplessness at our
gathering infirmity. Now, padding about in our bare feet, what can the future
hold except the (previous) memory of laughter in these summer days?”
Our work – my work – in the garden continued and despite the agonies being endured by
one’s nearest and dearest, every garden day was a pleasure to me that summer, every previous
day having been an investment which seemed to pay dividends remarkably quickly. Life,
outwardly, on our little estate plodded on as fairly as the horses’ hooves when they gave rides to
the Tippetts girls and to all the various visitors. The blacksmith, a Mr Roberts from Box, arrived
to tend to said hooves and very nice and expensive he was. As I watched him with his portable
forge and anvil, I felt that I might indeed have tapped into that ‘Englishness’ for which I had
been looking and which had certainly put me in touch with that part of me which needed the
vindication. However, there were other parts which even the best of Nature was not reaching and
there were yet other parts where Nature was reaching a little deeper than required.
“Sometimes, I feel that I am taking on another, or a different, identity here
– like stepping into the shoes of someone else. I feel very monkish, sometimes
even religious but in what sense I cannot tell. I am attracted to white, both in
clothing and decoration. Perhaps I am becoming a reincarnation of one of my
Carthusian predecessors who once walked these paths and fields. The sense of
holiness, of beauty and wonder is everywhere in this place, in the very grass of
the meadows to every leaf on every tree …”
What I was trying to describe as ‘holy’ moments now sounds horribly precious but my
pretentious words really were how I felt. And indeed, Ed and I enjoyed many lovely, memorable
days although at the end of some, a melancholy pall descended beneath which my hand was
guided to write:
“A really beautiful day in all ways – Sun and friends, food and wine – what
more can one man ask except to be left alone by the world to be himself. I envy
monks; the monastic way of life, ascetic and purgative, appeals to me more and
more as I get older. As I reject more of the world, I find it more and more
difficult to even accept that which remains. I fear that I will never be able to
accept the world in its imperfect state. I know that I ought to but I cannot,
however hard I try. People constantly disappoint, never living up to expectations
and, for my part, I will always expect. Why, I do not know and cannot analyse …”
There can have been no brain cells functioning with any significant effect within my head.
My mind seemed to have been bouncing off the inside walls of my skull, bruising itself with
every knock-on. A sort of pseudo-mystical, confused new age warp of perspective had overtaken
me. It morphed with all those un-dead regrets which waited like guerrilla psycho-zombies for
any stray thought which could be used to prise open the scar that my inopportune loss of childish
Congregationalist faith had bequeathed me. “ … White doves circle this place like
returning souls, wandering forever in the true heaven of the universe, touching
our rock pool with their wing tips and then soaring off again, away back to God
…”
Yes. I wrote this. Me. Can you imagine having to live with someone like me, the person I
was then? I am beginning to adjust some of my feelings about Ed as I realise I was being just as
much a pain in the ass as I thought he was.
But in my defence, I remember so vividly that childish religion or rather I remember the
churchgoing, the idealism, the need to be good, to obey the Ten Commandments and adhere to
other biblically proclaimed behaviour and therefore to live the perfect life, basking in God’s
perfect love. I remember the joy I used to feel in church made even more painful by the dreadful
disappointment when that childish web of wonder was exploded, when God was not where I had
thought him, her or it to be and thence being locked out of being able to believe. By that time I
was already formed. My perfect world lay in tatters. I don’t think I ever recovered for I was
never guided to see the reality in which others were apparently still able to see God. It helps me
explain to myself why people and practice constantly and inevitably disappointed me.
The summer continued in incredibly good weather. I had met Ed Murray in the flaming
summer heat wave of 1976, two years earlier and now in 1978, it looked as though we were in
for a repeat of the drought. Things were very dry and needed constant watering. Oops. In fact all
the corners of my life needed watering.
It is one of the hardest tasks in life to survive being ceremoniously dumped. The civility of
the rejection, wrapped around as it is with concern and care and ‘and I still love you, in my way
…’. Being left, or thrown out or never seen and ‘never darken my doorstep again’ – that’s much,
much easier because you have no control. Having to walk away yourself is a copper-bottomed
toughie. Sarah was finding walking away from John Reid very hard as, in her own words “there
was still something to walk away from …” However, as her, possibly, closest friend at the time, I
too was finding it hard to remember that she was still only just eighteen. Often, one person’s
problems can be another person’s lifeline, their passing raison d’etre. Some people can be
endlessly and patiently on hand to husband another’s troubles. Sadly, I am not one such person. I
knew that in those circumstances I should have been a merely passive friend but such a reactive
reaction to her spilled troubles were not, in my view, what she needed. I probably added to her
hurt and I now regret deeply all those occasions on which I overstepped the bounds delineated
even by what I believe is now called tough love.
The late night telephone calls persisted: “ … woken at 2.15 by a ‘phone call from
Sarah who had just lived through yet another inconclusive encounter with Reid – I
know he wants her to be the one to make the break and he is cutting her no slack
whatsoever. I feel that she is probably getting round to his way of thinking even
though she doesn’t want to let go at all and he does have that hold. Having had
my own experience, I cannot see what either Sarah or even Elton see in John Reid.
There is NOTHING there except an ability, a facility to make people dependent on
him … Elton will kick him out one day, wait and see dear diary, one of your blank
pages, waiting so patiently to be filled with history – it makes me feel somewhat
futile to know that history is already written, written but unseen to human eyes
…”
The situation’s ultimate demarche took another three weeks to become final and the end
came about not because of endless conversations with friends or because of over-analysing and
navel-gazing. It came as the consequence of a horribly ironic event. Sarah had indeed come to
the conclusion that the idea of any joint future was never to be and, being a writer, she had
written the necessary (in her eyes) farewell note and, to ensure she didn’t change her mind whilst
the Royal Mail worked its unpredictable magic, she took it round to Montpellier Square to
deliver by hand and thus she rang Reid’s bell. The door was opened not by a retainer or even an
employee or even by John himself but by John’s latest male lover just arrived from New York. If
Sarah hadn’t been a writer, needing to write THAT farewell note, she might never have known
that the young man was staying.
Whatever … This cruel but efficient nemesis left her in need of no more convincing and
through her parents, Sarah issued a ‘that’s it’ statement to the gossip columns. I issued a
statement to myself: “… How I pray that her heart and her warm receptiveness to
others will not be irreparably damaged by the events of the past few weeks. It’s
all so sad and so very un-necessary. Perhaps if she could write about it …”
She did write about it, later, in magazine and newspaper columns but not in any depth and in
that brittle, amusing, worldly way which is supposed to characterise the hard-bitten journalist
who can write about whatever subject she or he is paid to write. As a denouement, because of the
affair, Sarah made her life her art and fashioned both to feature long into the future in the society
and gossip columns, although branded forever by the ‘dumped’ tag, the ‘once fiancée of’ tag.
Maybe she did write about it for herself although if she did, she never showed it to me and the
exorcism didn’t work and she is still missing the millionaire she lost even as I write, twenty-six
years later. I never knew which was the greater aphrodisiac, his power or her love. And how and
why can I say these things which some will construe as cold and harsh and unfeeling? Because,
in truth, she and I are not much different and there, as my friend Freddie Mercury always said
when no further discussion was required, there you have it, dears.
Ed and I made yet another trip to Scotland on a whirlwind round of buying sources and Ed
invited Robert Thomas to accompany us. We were staying with Kenny Jackson in Edinburgh and
our little vagabond trio must have appeared to Kenny as a sort of Bohemian ménage a trois.
It was obvious that Ed needed a more active business partner than I could ever be or have
been, if only to fuel his own waning enthusiasm. The role of teaching someone else to be as
canny a buyer as he and imparting the knowledge to do so fitted Ed like a glove. Robert brown-
nosed Ed, schmoozed him and flattered him and Ed, whether he knew it or not, was predictably
flattered. I was becoming very much hors de service in Ed’s business perspective. He refused to
entertain any thought of giving me even the smallest emolument for my contribution to the
running of the house and the park and would become apoplectic with rage that I wouldn’t sink
any of my own money into his business. Had I had even one working brain cell, I would have
seen that I was making myself redundant. Where once all we ever used to do was fuck, all we
ever seemed to do now was ruck … To compound the rhyme, they were always mucky rucks.
And, finally, as some American literary genius once pronounced:
‘When the fuckin’ you’re getting’ ain’t worth the fuckin’ you’re gettin’ …’
The seemingly endless round of cooking and entertaining also more than kept pace with
itself. Towards the end of August, Tim Curry called asking himself down for the weekend and
proposed that he bring with him David Meyer, my university peer with whom I had had an affair
whilst we were students. I have written before about David, the twin of Anthony, and there is
nothing else to say other than that he had made a career as an actor since we had graduated
although he was no longer a friend in any way. I’m afraid I had been ‘the dumper’ and David had
found the rejection more than difficult. I sensed, painfully, that I had never been ‘forgiven’ and
thus our paths had long since bifurcated. But, I told Tim that David would be welcome even
though, as I extended the invitation, a warning voice whispered in my ear about introducing yet
another beautiful young man to Ed at that time; most of my former lovers had strained, panting,
at the leash when I had introduced them to the beautiful David Meyer and I had sworn never to
do so again.
In the end, I was spared the ordeal as David telephoned to say that he couldn’t come. Tim
came and we had a good weekend, talking long into the night, yet again, about ‘the career’. I was
beginning to suspect that it was a career which would never happen, not in the way it had
originally been conceived – star actor and rock legend. His was a career which was being talked
about too much rather than gotten on with, much like my relationship with Ed. As Elvis once
sang, something about too much talk and too little action.
I think Tim was beginning to get this picture too although, understandably, for him to have
even voiced such doubts would have made his immediate future a thousand times more difficult.
He was to stay aboard his own decelerating carousel for one further album with A and M
records. I noted that Tim and I went into Bath that weekend to see SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
and I further noted that I found it ‘boring – a vehicle for the doubtful talents of John
Travolta’ and so … So, so much did I know about showbiz to have even thought I could give
advice to Tim?
Other visitors included the journalist Robin Katz, an American girl who lived in London and
with whom David Minns and I had been friendly. She arrived with David Thomson, a journalist
who had been editor on both the Evening Standard and the Daily Express. What their
relationship was eluded me and, unexplained, it was thus their business. Robin quickly outstayed
her welcome. ‘Hickory dickory dock, the mouth ran away with the brain …’ I suppose it was the
decade for not only all the minorities to both ‘come out’ but for everyone to have radical
opinions about not only their own minority but anyone’s minority.
Robin had recently written a quite revolutionary piece in HONEY Magazine - now
hopefully defunct – on the emerging subject of homosexuality. The fundament of her crass
confidence was a professional Jewishness which I found as impenetrable as she obviously found
my gayness. On quite what her self-styled Kinsey-esque academic authority was based, I don’t
know because she had a nil-to-minus understanding of the phenomenon of boys and boys.
Maybe she thought that the arbitrary rag-bag of her arrant, unquenchable feminism equipped
or entitled her to opine. If she had been born in Detroit, it would not have surprised me because
the motor-mouth just kept on running big-time like it was a gas guzzling auto-behemoth. Like
who CARES if a chairperson is a chairman or a chairwoman? This woman needed labels, she
needed to file, she needed fixed points on her map and she needed signposts on every corner. She
was thoroughly, typically American, a woman who found ‘don’t know’ dangerous and who had
to have definite opinions about everything, who indisputably knew her right from her wrong and
that her opinion was always the right one even when no right one was called for or pertinent. I
remember overhearing an American aboard a cruise ship once opine after hearing a really
tremendous lecture from an eminent Oxbridge academic: “It was ok but it was so … so English.
It never GOT anywhere!” Erudite, informed discussion is pointless as it can never produce a
result and only results can be used to earn. Learn and Earn should be the second-string motto of
many an American college.
However, as punishment for the unkindness of my thoughts, life later offered me a slice of
humble pie which Robin sat and watched me eat. Robin Katz soon made a return visit, this time
with her parents. And they had come to buy. Buy stuff. OUR stuff. Cripes!
There were lots of hearty jokes about ‘we should be behind red ropes in this room’ and ‘it’s
not a house, it’s a palace!’ It was like having Ruby Wax come visiting with Mr and Mrs Bette
Midler. Anyway, we worked damned hard and swallowed our humble pie like men, real men not
homos and to our astonishment, the Katzes eventually bought a richly gilt-framed painting of a
Bavarian Blacksmith from us for five hundred quid which more than helped the bank balance.
Quite how a picture of a blacksmith from the heart of Hitler-land was going to hang on a Jewish
drawing room wall, I did not even start to fathom but Ed and I were suitably grateful when the
cheque arrived and grovellingly relieved when it cleared the bank.
David Minns had started work again which accounted for our not seeing him so much. He
had found a job with Jim Beach working in the video company which Beach and others had
established as did many other media entrepreneurs, realising the significance of the opportunities
presented by the relatively new technology. QUEEN had indeed shown the way. The availability
of videos once again expanded the mushrooming market for music product.
My father had come to stay for a few days whilst my mother was away … What am I saying
so blithely? WHERE did my mother go? I never made a note of it and I now find that omission
most peculiar as my mother only very infrequently spent time away from my father. Of course,
dad didn’t come to lounge about and toy with those three graces who have lately become my
most treasured companions, namely Idleness, Indolence and Indulgence. No, he came to labour
and sweat and strain with Ed on finally completing the conversion of the coach-house project. He
showed little of himself, as always, and seemed silent and almost tongue-tied whenever other
friends and guests arrived, always excusing himself rather than being in any extended, convivial
company. He was as much a stranger to me then as he was in the week before he died over a
quarter of a century later. I never got to know my father and to what I knew, I fear I failed to
respond. Other people tell me about my father; I have to rely on other family and friends and
even strangers for all the information about how he felt towards me, information that as he failed
to communicate it himself, I found and still find hard to believe. Like the street posters in
Glasgow which read: I DON’T BELIEVE THE TRUTH. It’s another one of life’s toughies.
However, I was not so self-absorbed to realise that one of the great bequests that my living
at Homewood had already engendered in me was a love which was to stand me in more than
good stead in years to come. “I treasure,” I wrote, “the fulfilment which entertaining
people gives me. It’s something I savour like a perfect wine …” This was to become
a significant straw which I would later grasp for dear life. But a straw, it was …
And there was a lot of entertaining and a lot of wine in which to hone my definition of
‘perfect’, a lot of it - both company and wine - brought from Country Cousin by the dear and
much put-upon and now very much missed Cherry Brown, who with her then boyfriend Rodney
North were always welcome guests especially as Rodney could always be counted on to mend
something. I do like a man who’s good with his hands … I really envied Cherry’s and Rodney’s
togetherness but I never saw ‘forever’ in the relationship they enjoyed. Another increasingly
frequent visitor was Richard Sweet, the owner of the Oasis club in Bristol who didn’t even know
what the word forever meant although he could always be counted on for good company and
would usually bring along his walker of the day. There was an endless parade. Once it was a man
from Birmingham whose first indignant announcement upon entering the house, uttered with all
the effrontery of someone who has been insulted beyond all measure, was: “I’m a Socialist,
y’know!” to which my recorded reply was:
“So, would you like to see the house now or after we’ve had some tea?”
I think it was perhaps that night when we had driven back with Richard to the Oasis that the
club was raided by the Bristol constabulary. Ooops. Names taken. Warnings issued. Unspoken
threats delivered. How I hated the strong-arm of the law.
As I have already said, our lives were beginning to be centred more upon that smoky
basement club in Bristol than in the open air of Homewood and I found myself writing on the
last day of August: “All is seasonal again, instead of timeless … A definite chill in
the air heralds autumn. The swallows darted about the house for an hour this
morning as though reminding themselves for next year of the whereabouts of their
now-redundant nests, waiting for the final rallying call which would take them
southwards to Africa.
They left and the summer was suddenly gone. I ran out into the garden and
actually called out to them, shouted after them: “Come back …” I felt like crying
but didn’t. Maybe we shall have an Indian summer? The sunflowers are lovely and
bright along the wall of the kitchen garden and, for forty pence, the price of a
pint of beer, the gladioli by the greenhouse are stunning in their colour and
size. The lavender is lovely in front of the small sitting room. Golden Rod and
big yellow daisies are out in the herbaceous border. The Virginia creeper is in
its prime, a lovely rusty red on the wall of the kitchen sitting room. The whole
place is a delight, lawns mowed properly and everything full and content after
this lovely summer, like how I want to feel in my old age, full and mellow, not
quite spent but happy to look forward to a long sleep after such a full, full
life …”
And talking of full, full lives, as September paled into October, I had a call from my friend
Colin Higgins. He was staying at The Dorchester. His hospitality suites in London had been
getting better and better. From his bed in the sitting room in our first Putney flat, through to the
Hilton Hotel, The Inn on the Park and finally The Dorchester, Colin’s Hollywood progress was
fast, furious and always upwards. Coincidentally, in that way one does, I had been thinking about
him that very day and reflecting how long ago the HAROLD AND MAUDE days seemed to be.
“… lovely, creative days when I thought that art was all and nothing else ever
tasted or smelled so good. Oh dear … what happened to the bluebird, HIS bluebird
yet, in those cloudless skies? Truth is, of course, that the skies were never
cloudless and our bluebirds were long-tailed sparrows dipped in pots of Cerulean
paint.” One of the projects Colin had been working on was a remake of the Maeterlinck play
THE BLUEBIRD, based on one of the Brothers Grimm’s tales, although it was not Colin’s
version which George Cukor finally filmed. I had met the fabled film director with Colin whilst
he had been working on the script for this joint Russo-American production when Cukor was
directing Kate Hepburn at Shepperton Studios in HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY. Colin had
been brought to the project by Edward Miller, one of the co-producers of HAROLD AND
MAUDE of which Cukor had been a great fan.
Wow. Time out to dab with lace-edged hanky at one very misty eye. Sometimes, I can’t bear
all this reminiscence … They’re all gone, now. Colin was one of the fabulous cornerstones of my
world and I hate him not being at the end of a telephone or an aeroplane ride. I hate being denied
our own continuing confabulation but death, necessarily, has that effect.
I realised that many an autumn was well on the way and that the first of several final
chapters was being written when I met a boy called David at The Oasis one night and, as you do
between meals, we told each other a little of ourselves. He worked on a farm. I had chickens in
which I was losing interest. Had we something in common? He offered to come over and kill the
chickens for me … Ouch. No, we had nothing in common.
Talk about red in tooth and claw. Plugged into Englishness? Attuned to country, nature and
the rural life? Daisy, really … Sometimes you were such a bloody phoney! Instead, a couple of
days later, I called my farmer David and explained about my delicate conscience. Without
judgement, he agreed to come and take the chickens away. How strange that I should have no
pangs of conscience knowing that the chickens were going to be killed elsewhere? Not only a
phoney, Dais, you were also something of a moral coward. Trouble was, I didn’t see it. Then.
And Farmer David in the light of day and unaided by alcohol wasn’t the same as a mere snack …
As difficult as Sarah Forbes had found putting down the torch she had carried for John Reid,
so would I find it equally hard to relinquish the torch I bore for Homewood. I knew that when the
time came, it would be down to me to do the dumping. Homewood had no need to even raise its
little finger, let alone its voice. It would be down to me to walk away although doing so in the
autumn of 1978, other than in a petulant fit knowing that I would be back by evening, was only a
low cloud and still one beneath the horizon.
The 6th of October saw Ed and I sitting on the garden wall, pondering the anniversary of
almost a year of our lives, sipping coffee after I had picked all the lavender from the garden and
put it in little vases all around the house. “Warm, lovely day, jolly good for the end of
the first week of October. I marvelled at the late-flowering jasmine which I had
culled from the pruning of the greenhouse plant which had grown, now watered and
cared for, through the open ventilator. The perfume is heavenly and reminds me of
the spring which seems a lifetime away. There is also some late flowering on the
veronica and the hydrangeas are still sprouting gallantly. What a delight this
place is and always will be. I really can ask nothing more than to be allowed to
live here for all eternity … I like thinking that the chestnut tree which we
planted in the middle of the lawn will grow up with us here. I wonder how tall it
will be when we die?”
Was it this thought that lulled me to sleep one night when we returned from the Oasis Club?
If it was, it was able to eclipse the other thought, the penultimate one. I had thought it very
strange and was haunted by how very nice and smiley and attentive the Oasis barman had been
earlier, the usually sulky and very available James Carter. I should have paid more attention,
especially as a recent consultation of the I CHING had declared: “Beware of a repetition of
danger …”.
 Chapter Fourteen

“… and if I laugh,’tis that I may not

weep …”
Lord Byron

The three months before Christmas saw the business situation crystallise yet again in that,
although this particular withdrawal was never admitted to, any plans Ed might have harboured
for a partnership with Robert Thomas were slid diplomatically onto the back burner with what I
assume was mutual consent. Definite moves were made by Ed towards the establishment of
Raphael Antiques using the cottage and recently completed coach house as well as over-spilling
into the dining room and drawing room of the house. My journal records me doing a lot of
polishing and flower arranging and asking my father to paint us a sign which could be hung out
on the roadside of the A 36, advertising our presence. Quite who was going to staff the premises
as a retail operation must have been arranged on assumption because I can find no mention of
any discussion in which Ed asked me to be that person. A meeting with Martin Melman to
finalise Raphael Antiques’ accounts for 1977-78 indicated that Ed’s business had made more
than he had thought, some £16,000 profit and the figures indicated that I should be paid an
amount of £5000, whether as a personal acknowledgement or as a means of reducing the tax
implications or as an inducement to embrace my future as a shop assistant I knew not and,
furthermore, I have no idea how this figure was arrived at or who calculated it and, ultimately, I
never remember receiving it and neither does my bank statement. My capital after the sale of my
flat remained stable for a year at a level of some £14,000. I now think that my emolument was no
more than the proverbial paper moon, hanging over a cardboard sea …
But to substantiate Ed’s latest business decision we had customers … Each caller bought
something and, although I haven’t totalled the figures, all of which I recorded with great pride, I
now understand that Ed saw he could make a go of the in-house retail business, helped by a few
glamorous photographs in the antiques trade press. A photographer was duly engaged to produce
some suitable images and we spent a freezing morning in the coach house artfully arranging
lights and sets to make a bombe-fronted Dutch marquetry bureau look sexy. The entire process
had to be repeated when the first photographer’s work failed to impress.
In the park, the leaves fell and had to be raked up to maintain the overall image and in the
colder weather, contrary to Robert-the-Horse’s original sales pitch, the animals’ had to be tended
more thoroughly. Stephen Carey from the farm across the A36 agreed to sell us an initial load of
hay to start us off which was kind of him considering he had cut our fields and taken the hay in
the first place which he was now selling back to us. Carey’s supply was simply inadequate and
by the end of November a local feed company, Toop’s of Frome, had delivered a ton of the stuff
and charged £50 for the privilege. It was to last hardly a month. Additionally, to add to the two
hungry equine mouths, Ed, inexplicably, bought a third nag from Robert-the-Horse, a mare
which was called, with a typical excess of Celtic imagination, Tina. I immediately wanted to re-
christen her Xanthe but the damage had already been done. She answered to Tina and Tina alone
and to bastardise further a well-worn Dorothy Parkerism, ‘though the horse had been taken out of
South Wales, South Wales could never be taken out of the horse.’
And George arrived too, Robert’s personal, private horse who, still no more than an elderly
foal, was giddy and naughty and black and, apparently, had un-descended testicles. Whether his
physiological condition predicated his mental wobbliness, I was not informed. He also had
incredibly long legs and used them to step casually over the garden wall and wander across the
lawn up to the house. Presumably his lack of testicles made it easier for him to step over the
jagged top of the dry-stone wall without either harming himself or Robert’s chances of a profit!
By Christmas, I had horsed myself out and willingly admitted my initial mistake with such
ardour that even the stubborn Ed had to admit that four horses was at least two too many.
Gathering autumn in the park and garden also brought blackberries to the briars and a rash of
late tomatoes from the plants I had grown outside which I had grubbed up and tossed onto the
pyre I had been building to celebrate November 5th, a fireworks festival accompanied by a really
good bangers ’n’ baps ’n’ beer ’n’ bonfire party. However, the tomatoes were still green and
along with the pounds and pounds of blackberry jam and jelly that I made, beside these jars on
groaning larder shelves were pounds and pounds of green tomato chutney, made with
contributions of surplus Bramley apples from the Luxmoore neighbours and glass containers
both begged, borrowed and bartered. A fruit orchard for Homewood was still in the planning
stage and I made a mental note … Don’t.
But, less daily work in garden maintenance had enabled me to return to writing and I
eschewed what I had previously scribbled beneath the title DEAD AND FALLEN HORSES and
returned to reworking my novelised version of what I imagined Micky Hannah’s story might
have been. Sadly, this three part novel never found a home, ‘though now, in 2005, I have learned
never to give up hope. It’s still in the drawer awaiting transfer to a digital format.
I wish I had known then what life was later to teach me about men and men and, more
particularly, about me and myself. But I hadn’t. In October, the 11th to be precise, it was whilst
once again in either self-pity or advanced depression that I dramatised my situation as being ‘in
the fiery pits’ and I struggled to explain how I felt: “ … an awful lassitude has overtaken me
again – like a bad hangover, I have a constant tiredness around and behind my
eyes, a desire to weep and a total lack of interest, incentive and will – I feel
drained. I have, by degrees, stripped my life down to its bare bones and now I
find that there is nothing left to strip. The purge has left me defeated and
doomed in the face of the enormity, complexity and total power of elemental
nature. I sit and stare into the fullness of space, thinking I understand mankind
and realising that even with that knowledge, I know nothing of the ultimate
mysteries. Nowhere to turn, blinkered and tied like a horse in an abattoir, I can
ONLY go on and yet I am frightened and lonely and ill. I cry out ‘Mother!’ and
even that I don’t mean …”
A few days later my mood hadn’t broken and by this time Ed too confessed to feeling great
depression and that he thought that I was the cause of it. Being informed so baldly had made me
feel so much worse about myself as suddenly the notion of guilt had been introduced into my
garbled thinking, which had theretofore been predicated only on my idea that I was some sort of
victim rather than a fool of my own creation. Now, apparently, I was also the tyrant: “Again,
rain and a very overcast day. The piles of the carpets of fallen leaves thicken
everyday. I’m sitting in the kitchen writing this watching two white shirts
dancing and writhing on the washing line outside in the yard – Ed’s and mine –
like two souls hung out to dry, clean and naked in the winds of change and time.
Will the pegs hold? Will the two shirts stay on the line? Will one or both blow
away?”
I often ruminate on the possibility that the demise of David Minns’s relationship with
Freddie had freed me from the obligation to also occupy the love lane of life’s highway. It was as
though I had no need to be ‘coupled up’ any more. It’s a vain line of thought but one I idly
pursued. By the middle of November, Ed and I had both grasped the nettle of our problem in a
different way. We became proactive and, as far as I was concerned, I avoided a full-scale
emotional breakdown, although that was a strategy born more of luck than judgement. “Gusty
winds and lots of rain. Today was slightly more noteworthy in that I decided to
stop pretending both to myself and to Ed. I own up that I am NOT happy because I
am totally unfulfilled. I am hanging my life on the peg of another’s making and I
can’t go on doing so. I’m making everyone else, including myself, unhappy. I’m my
own master and this charade of kow-towing to a myth of my own making has to stop.
The myth, of course, is that of the happy couple, devoted to hearth, home and
horses, content to live out the rest of their lives here within Homewood’s happy
boundaries. Wrong! It never could have worked. Ed, exactly like me, is too
stubborn and too proud and the mutual sublimation would never have happened. We
both feel trapped and constricted and what was a haven has turned into a hell and
because I feel it so, it drains us both of the will even to live.
So, what do I do? I don’t know. Not that I want to move from here. It will
always be my home as long as Ed is here. Otherwise, I would be just as happy in a
tent. I cannot commit to a way of life I don’t believe in … although I doubt if I
will ever find anything in this imperfect world to which I can permanently commit
myself. I seem to be the essence of man’s moral, ethical and spiritual dilemma. I
suffer where other men revel. To me, the reason for being alive is more important
than being alive. I seem to be unable to change that assessment however much I
would dearly like to. I want to be ‘me’ again, whoever that me might be, the me
which is simultaneously the social butterfly, the eager beaver, the worker, the
slave, the inverted, humble, passionate, arrogant devotee of anything and
everything that will allow my great big horrid ego spread its wings and fly! I am
my own burden and yet am too much of a coward to drop it, even though I KNOW I
should.”
It appears that with great resolve and without excess emotion, I crammed all this psycho-
babble into Ed’s ear as I was peeling the potatoes that evening. He seemed to agree both with my
sentiments and my conclusions and was very patient with me. I wished that I could continue with
the lie but in a relationship where the together time was being spent talking about the relationship
instead of getting on with the relationship, I thought it was best to face whatever facts could be
elicited from the miasma. Constantly ‘trying to work it out’ was patently no substitute for living
‘it’ although the finale of the play we were acting was still a few scenes away. Ends are arrived
at by means and I realised that I was still too fond of the man to follow the stepping stones
towards the exit willy-nilly. I really wanted him to be happy: “… If I had any guts, I’d just
go and leave him alone. I’m sure he’d be happier. There’s too much other hassle
he has to bear, anyway …”
Ed’s mother, Jan, a hovering presence both around and between us, had been finding old age
more than difficult away from her home and familiars. However much we both tried to persuade
her into being more social and arranging opportunities for her to be so, both at Homewood and at
other local affairs such as the W.I, she stubbornly refused and did so with no good grace. I
wished that just once she had said: “Please, boys, I know you’re trying to help but I’m quite
happy just pottering about as I am …” Or words to that effect. But none came and none came
because she patently wasn’t happy, hence our futile attempts to compensate. Although, on one
level, I felt deeply for her, I also grew to resent her, a silly contradiction I acknowledge but for
there to have been no contradictions would have necessitated us all being saints and we were
only human.
“Thursday 16th December 1978 … Mrs Mitchell telephoned today to ask Jan to
the Friendship Club today. Jan declined. Later, having been mulling her refusal
over, she announced that she agreed with (Aunt) Mabel that they preferred the
company of younger people and that they didn’t like old people. So, great … Nor
do Ed and I particularly like the company of older people. I too prefer company
of my own age and so, madam, as far as I’m concerned you can rot in the ferment
of your own discontent and misery. I don’t want or like to make war on old ladies
but I cannot live with that negative, mindless attitude any longer. It’s totally
draining and only emphasises the already meaninglessness of our life. Yes, dear
diary, I was REALLY angry today!”
For both Ed and I, even though we had, in a sense, cheated and scanned ‘The End’ before
we had finished reading the play, in becoming single men once again the way to achieve that end
was not going to be easy. We had hitherto had a ‘no passing fancies at the house’ rule, sort of
like that notice which I remember being nailed to the gate of every respectable house when I was
young – ‘No Circulars, No Hawkers’.
I pondered on that meaning for years, never thinking to ask. To those who are still pondering
the notice on Ed’s and my garden gate, it meant that neither of us was permitted to entertain
casual sexual partners at home, a pale of behaviour which Ed had asked us to erect as much for
his mother and the security of his ‘stuff’ as for ourselves. So, I figured it was pretty natural, yea
necessary, that forays to the outer world had, by dint of that rule, to be made. That was fine,
except that I had imagined that these sorties would somehow be announced by the participants.
It was the day that Suzanne Bertish came to stay that I sensed that Ed’s surprise sortie and
the advertised schedule didn’t marry. We had both been looking forward to her arrival. Suzanne
was, is, an actress. She is what I call a proper actress, meaning that the shilling she earned for her
labour was of equal value to the shilling she didn’t earn for her integrity. I’m sure she turned
down much more work than she ever accepted and on the equal shilling basis would now be
rather wealthy. Suzanne was not and never has been for sale and would have, and could, never
have been bought; I am of the belief that she has never done anything she didn’t believe in and I
believe she has suffered accordingly although I’m sure she has never seen her career as a
suffering. She is highly intelligent and still thoroughly sensitised.
However, at the time of which I write, she was yet to enjoy her greatest triumphs and be
accorded her most fulsome public plaudits and, at said time was working with a small company
of significant actors which I remember as some sort of touring part of the Royal Shakespeare
Company. It was in the days before the company’s permanent home in London’s Barbican,
which was then only a building site, if not still an idea. Suzanne was due to appear the following
night locally in THREE SISTERS. Ed liked her, I know he did but nevertheless he announced
that he would not be around to greet her but that he would be going to Bristol, to The Oasis for
its Sunday lunchtime opening and would not be around during the day.
David Minns was also staying and together, he and I and Suzanne walked and talked and
enjoyed a lovely autumn afternoon, threshing the grain of gossip and mutual friends and
acquaintances.
I made dinner, expecting to eat with Ed as usual about eight o’clock. By eight-thirty, he
hadn’t returned and rather foolishly, considering we were supposed to be ‘single men’ again, I
became first worried and then alarmed when by half-past-eight he hadn’t turned up. By nine
o’clock I had even started to telephone, first Robert Thomas and then Robert Cork, like some
demented hausfrau. He turned up at nine-fifteen, announcing that he had been ‘for a think and a
drive’. It was an unnecessary alibi. You can tell when someone has been fucking.
We ate together and afterwards, as David and Suzanne went to bed early, Ed proceeded to
tell me what was wrong with our relationship. His opinion came from somewhere over his
shoulder. Ed was never THAT lucid especially after a drink, a think, a drive AND a fuck! What I
heard was his dick talking. But, for the next couple of days, we put on our thinking caps,
scratched our heads and yet again contemplated the meaning of love. Our love. No, MY love.
We agreed again that we were too alike but where does the recognition of the lack of
complimentary virtues take a couple except to the brink of both individual and mutual
extinction? All that I had come to suppose was that we would always argue, always bicker and
skirmish, circling the ultimate central fire of our togetherness like two tigers, both scared of
being burned. I thought we came to the conclusion, again, that neither of us wanted to split up for
whatever reasons but, for me at least, rather than being afraid of the moment, I began to take
refuge in the possibility of separation as a final alternative.
The following day, I drove to Frome to see Suzanne’s performance as Masha on the stage of
the Merlin Theatre in Chekhov’s THREE SISTERS. I didn’t just ‘see’ the play; I allowed it to
enter my soul. It was all about me … Me and Ed and his mother in that house and all the transfer
of neurosis, the contagion of anxiety and unhappiness, which turns otherwise peaceful people
into raging lunatics. Oh, what of the future? We all have our Moscows and we each know how
far away they dwindle, finally vanishing into the hopelessness of yet another lightless day
exactly the same as the lightless day before. It is the penalty for the sophistication of our
idleness, of our security. Give a man a solid foundation and he will either try to test it by
knocking it down or he will become bored and move to another house.
Two of Suzanne’s friends from the company, Susan Tracy and Bob Peck, came back to
supper afterwards. Where Ed was, I didn’t record. The following day I drove to Blandford Forum
in Dorset but either I was still punch-drunk from the Chekhov or maybe it was that TWELFTH
NIGHT just didn’t do it for me. La Bertisha was too young for the Countess and neither Edward
Petherbridge nor Ian McKellen as Toby Belch cut any of my mustard whatsoever. Those were
the days when Sir Ian, as he is now, was still in the closet, unable to meet anyone’s gay eye, a
trait which he still affected after he’d let himself out to cast himself in the unbidden role of one
of gaydom’s least required ‘ambassadors’. But in timely fashion, that was not until
homosexuality itself had become socially acceptable and when it could be palpably argued that
no one lost any work because of smears of the limp wrist variety. Rather the opposite, actually.
But less haste with the chronology, Daisy and certainly fewer sour gripes. Sorry, that’s grapes, of
course!
But as a counter to all the doom and gloom, my otherwise dry sandwich frequently enjoyed
a very rich filling. To wash the filling down even more pleasantly, I had discovered the wine
merchants Yapp Brothers, a recommendation of Peter Wood’s who obviously felt that I needed a
short sharp lesson in the appreciation of wines and their passports. Indeed, Yapps of Mere
purveyed some lovely wine and, under their guidance and entirely according to my budget, I
started to buy, convinced that my social arsenal would be proportionately enhanced. Goodness
me; would I soon be succumbing to an equal appreciation of opera? Time and tide let me off that
hook, a release I have always regretted, although at the time Ed pointed out that we couldn’t
drink opera.
From the Yapps, I bought Gamay de l‘Ardeche ’77 first of all and a Muscadet sur Lie ’76 as
well as half-a-dozen fortifying bottles of a dessert Muscat, Beaumes de Venise which I had first
tasted chez The Batcombe Belle. As a teenager, I had learned a presumably authoritative French
saying whilst in Menton, years ago that “Un jour sans vin, c’est un jour sans soleil” and I
therefore assumed that in the deepening shadows of this particular English winter, a little
summer sunshine would not go amiss. No sooner had I embraced this idea than the clocks were
put back and summer finally retired. “Back go the clocks, on go the socks,” runs an English
saying which, on reflection, is probably one of my own invention. My linguistic perspectives had
obviously become hopelessly blocked with trite pan-European platitudes. Here’s another of my
own: “Without wine, every day is an emergency …”
And who better to drink the new cellar dry than a whole cast of visitors beginning with
Australian singer/songwriter Peter Allen and his American, very-much-younger friend Greg.
When Cherry Brown asked if it would be alright to bring them, Ed had, surprisingly, agreed
immediately even though he had never heard of Peter, whose own life, post mortem, later
became a hit musical show, THE BOY FROM OZ. Peter was playing a season at Country
Cousin and arrived at our front door, with his friend Greg and Cherry and Rodney North,
perfectly on cue. I had of course spent the whole day cleaning and bed-making and was just
taking a tray of raspberry buns out of the Aga when the entourage drove up to the front door.
How much more Pooh Corner could an Aussie boy expect except a tray of Lamingtons?
I delighted in Peter. He was a wonderful guest, entirely without pretension. His chart hit I
HONESTLY LOVE YOU had empowered his career to the point where in 1978 he had just
received the Entertainment Award from the then prestigious After Dark magazine. His work had
taken him away from Australia to a community just south of Los Angeles where he then lived.
Having once been Judy Garland’s accompanist, he had ended up that engagement with one of his
own; he’d married the boss’s daughter although his marriage to Liza Minelli was long over.
Hence Greg, very much the younger man, one of those boyfriends who was very ‘we’ oriented. I
was probably somewhat over-sensitive at his and Peter’s togetherness in the face of the decidedly
non-‘we’ condition of my own relationship.
But screw the fame and glory and international showbiz name-dropping, after we’d drunk a
couple of bottles of Christopher Hunter’s champagne and most of a rather un-butch bottle of
sherry that I’d found in a cupboard and after Peter had played Ed’s satinwood piano to Broadway
distraction and we had all joined in the choruses, the visitors leapt at the host’s suggestion of
continuing our pink evening in a hoi-poloi provincial homo-disco. There was none of the Tim
Curry-ish trepidation. We left Cherry and Rodney to an evening’s smooching on any one of
umpteen sofas available at Homewood and we boys enjoyed a rather boozy night at the Oasis
and returned to the sleep of the just.
The following morning we went riding - how we did these things with such crucifying
hangovers, I do not know - and, horror on horrors, Peter was thrown off Penny’s back as they
cantered around the Tippett’s field. However, he was thankfully unhurt and so the show that
night at Country Cousin could go on. We met again a couple of days later when he arranged a
seat for me to see his show and put me at a table at the front with the jazz singer-turned
Broadway babe Annie Ross and her brother, the Scots comedian Jimmy Logan. Ed hadn’t come.
I think his dick had told him not to. But farewell, Peter Allen … I was as sad to see you leave
Homewood, armed with jars of home-made marmalade and chutney as I was sad to see you
prematurely leave the planet, not too many years ahead, another celebrity victim of Aids. Good
knowing you, mate. You deserved longer here and we are all the poorer for not having had the
chance to enjoy many more years of your upbeat, foot-tapping talent.
I spent that night at David Minns’ temporary flat at 12 Eaton Terrace. What a miserable
place it was. After Country Cousin, I’d been tempted back to Maunckberry’s in Jermyn Street. It
was as though I’d never been away - Peter Straker, John Reid and all the usual suspects. Even
Melanie Green, who’d obviously recovered from her short engagement to Elton and was now
working for Adam Faith, now a successful actor and manager, representing that irrepressibly
bright seventies singer/songwriter Leo Sayer.
On another solo sortie to London I had dinner with Sarah at Nanette’s house in Elm Place
and, co-incidentally, as I was still writing and re-working my Michael Hannah novel, met Mark
Phillips again AND Joanna Lyall, Micky’s girlfriend at the time of his death. If I wasn’t sober
when they arrived, I was soon so. They were both as shocked to see me as I was them. We hadn’t
met since the day of the Memorial Service in 1973, held for Micky and the other victims of that
inhuman air crash. Some things really are too painful. We had each been part of a phenomenon
which couldn’t even be exhumed to be exorcised, the ghost of which was still haunting us all.
That night, I excused myself and, assuming Ed was enjoying the charms of the arms of his
current squeeze at the other end of the M4, found some consolation of my own with a man called
Brian Stone who lived in Little Venice. I only recorded his name because he told me something
that made me more hopeful about my own future than I had felt for months. He told me that it
was only when men who were older got together was there any possible hope of them being able
to forge a long-lasting relationship where the word ‘forever’ could even be entertained. He didn’t
tell me how much older I would have to be to qualify for this indulgence and I didn’t ask. I just
chose to believe him. I’m now very glad I did.
 Chapter Fifteen

“I tell you,” he said, “I used to work all

the time. That was because I was unhappy. Now
I’m not. Now I can sit around here and read
my books and enjoy my life … One of the
things you learn as you get older is that
you’re a damn sight more interesting than
most of the people you meet. Remember that.”
LEE MARVIN 1978

But to get to the stage in life to which Lee Marvin refers, he had had to go through a very
publicised and probably painful divorce, one which made several careers but possibly curtailed
his own, not because he was revealed as having two heads but because at its conclusion he didn’t
see much point in being a very well-paid actor anymore let alone an undervalued husband and
partner.
I have found it very difficult even to begin this chapter. I have such mixed emotions about
the first two months of 1979 which themselves have been recently stirred into an even more
indistinguishable slurry by my necessarily re-reading my journals. The passage of time has made
some aspects of my life clearer; others are even more confused. Between my scribbled lines, the
paramount tone of the time appears to have been sadness, a deep unhappiness created by two
people who eventually found that they wanted entirely different lives and who could never have
lived up to the promise of their initial friendship.
Our ways parted, Ed’s to concentrate on a life in the West Country, mine to be initially
pulled back to a life I had known, the London life which all my old friends still enjoyed and one
to which I could even have returned; several enquiries had been made for my services, including
one from Eric Hall who had asked David Minns if I might consider coming back to the music
business. But for a long while I was to be a refugee from both my worlds.
But even in the weeks which saw the ultimate polarisation between Ed and I, it is oddly
fascinating, so many years later, to see that we also had so many heart-warming times which,
ironically, strengthened even further the fabric of our past and added extra insult to our mutual
injuries. The passage of each day at Homewood made it more difficult for me to leave.
Instance: we had a wonderful Christmas Day in that magical place, a traditional celebration
in a fairytale setting, a warm and indestructible memory engraved forever on the minds of the
people who are still alive to remember. David Minns was already with us and had begun to cook
seriously, displaying that stupendous and original culinary talent which he always practised to
our collective delectation; Cherry Brown and Rodney North arrived just before mid-day with a
vast Dickensian hamper full of seasonal goodies and a real live Christmas fairy, namely Cherry’s
mother, Olive.
At seventy-two, Olive still worked at Sandersons, the fabric designers and printers in
Berners Street, off Oxford Street. In her early twenties, she had been one of the famous Bluebell
Girls and maintained the figure and demeanour which had defined her youth. She was entirely
lovely. If I found myself on the horns of a dilemma that Christmas, it was nothing to Olive’s.
Some six years earlier, at sixty-six, she had been deserted by her life-time spouse who had run
off with another woman. The scarlet one had recently died and Olive was in a complete two-and-
eight (state) as to whether or not she should reconcile with the errant ex-husband. In fact, I fancy
that they had never been divorced although they were not destined to reconcile. I continued my
acquaintance with this gentle woman until her death in the early nineteen-nineties when she had
moved in with Cherry who had relocated in Brighton where Christopher Hunter had opened his
very last restaurant.
However, I don’t think Christmas fairies like competition: Ed’s mother finally came
downstairs to grace us with her presence at one o’clock, just in time to eat lunch and contributing
nothing whatsoever to the festivities. Good Christmas fairy, bad Christmas fairy … Hey ho. Our
party was joined later by Robert Cork and Roger MacNichol and by Robert Thomas and his
friend Kevin, a Birmingham man we had met several times and whose company was always
rewarding. From my journal, it is apparent we not only had lunch and a full afternoon tea but
enjoyed our five course Christmas dinner after a good long walk in the afternoon. Dinner was
followed by drunken charades, an entertainment from which Ed’s mother absented herself once
again in favour of television. Was it a social phobia from which she suffered? Was it
curmudgeonliness or was she just an old lady from whom we expected far too much? Or
perhaps, some days, there were just too many fairies. Famine or feast?
Boxing Day was re-enforced by the arrival of Cherry’s friend Peggy and the now Trudeau-
less Gerard Manchon with Peggy’s kids, Sasha and Justin. Another day and yet another turkey,
one which Cherry had bought and which Roger Clifford helped us consume in the evening.
And then, just as quickly as it had arrived, Christmas was over. A whirlwind of friends and
meals and a resounding success. Ed seemed quite sad at its passing, sort of lost. Thoughts of
work and of selling antiques had once again slipped off his radar although he finally admitted to
me that he was pleased not to be involved with Robert Thomas in business as he thought Robert
‘weak and lazy’ and even went as far as wishing that he had listened to my caveats about the
tinker Welshman.
In the hub-bub, I have forgotten to mention that Tabitha had come to stay again. She settled
in immediately, ignoring Rufus and Monty in her queenly disdain although when I worked at my
typewriter, she sat purring on my pile of manuscript looking as powerful as the cat who had sat
in the arms of the deliciously wicked Charles Gray in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. She had
acquiesced in the notion that she and I had bonded during her illness and I rejoiced in our mutual
affection.
I had been to see my parents just before Christmas and stayed a night. Jan and Ed joined me
and the rest of the Evans family, including nephews Stephen and Michael, for lunch on the
second day. We had a lovely time. No confrontations or niggling little moments. My mother
seemed calm and very pleased to see us all. As I left, my father handed me a cheque for £250
from the family’s trust. It was the first time I had benefited from my grandfather’s legacy and I
should mention a little more about the financial edifice on which I had been building my
perspective of my own future.
The reason why it might appear that I treated my life with a degree of cavalier accidentalism
regarding finance was that I knew that I had no need to load myself with pension plans and
insurance policies to cover my middle and old age, that there was a rather substantial pot with
which we three children and my mother and father had been endowed. Although my parents,
especially my mother, had never been less than generous, their always qualified munificence
bore no relation to the legal right that I and the other four beneficiaries might realise to enjoy
some of the advantages that grandad’s property portfolio could bring. I had therefore deduced
that my youth and my thirties and probably my forties would take care both of themselves and
me. Thereafter, I had assumed that my great expectations would begin to kick in and the money
locked up in the substantial number of properties involved in the trust would become available.
However, despite what should have been properly said, my father approached his own
father’s Trust with the attitude that the whole of its principal was his, the only reason for the
establishment of the trust having been that my grandfather had wished to avoid death duties.
Otherwise, my father argued, he would have been the sole beneficiary of Bert’s estate, being the
sole surviving offspring. Inheritance tax was indeed avoided in 1971 when Bert died, but the
reality of the latent wealth within the trust was of no interest to my passive, non-proactive father
who tended to talk a lot about it but never did anything with it, especially in the way of spreading
some of it around the other beneficiaries. Neither did he exploit its potential by developing
available pieces of land and neither did he maintain or improve the properties within the portfolio
with any degree of attention and regard for the future. It goes without saying that the nominated
Trustees were the tame family accountant and the tame family solicitor, all of whom earned more
from said Trust in the way of annual accountings and occasional legal work and conveyances
than ever devolved upon the beneficiaries.
I never challenged this gross abuse of the terms of the Trust and the legal position
surrounding the beneficiaries’ expectations because my father was my father and I was the son
… Our relationship never matured. About four years before he died, he said to me as though I
should be pleased for his confidence: “You know, it takes a long time for a parent to trust his
child …”
I never said, “Ditto, dad,” although perhaps I should have done. Somehow, to have
attempted to blow the A.F Evans Trust apart would have seemed to me the lowest, most
dastardly exercise. I often thought about it, but I never resolved plans to do so past the phantasms
engendered beyond the pale of anger …
So, the appearance of a cheque for £250 at Christmas 1978 heralded the start of the trickle
which helped to finance my future. I never spent a penny of what I subsequently received from
the Trust over the years; I merely re-saved it. I’m thankful for my parsimony and my prudence
which enabled the growth of a very healthy nest egg because when Bert’s Trust finally came to
its end after my father’s death in 2004 and the assets devolved equally upon myself, my brother
and my sister, we collectively paid over seven hundred thousand pounds in inheritance tax and
duties pertinent to the realisation of the Trust’s assets. Between them, my canny grandfather and
my silly father contrived to subvert the very point of and reason for the Trust, namely to avoid
maximum taxation.
But I digress … The day after Boxing Day 1978, Ed decided not to come with Minns and I
to spend the day with Clodagh Wallace and her husband Jason and their daughter Nicola at their
cottage at Buckler’s Hard on the Solent. Tim Curry – also Clodagh’s client as well as her friend
and confidant - was there, set on recording another album with A and M Records and touring it
and promoting it in 1979. Our party’s burden of professional angst lightened when the delightful
and thankfully unburdened and uncomplicated Sarah Cape arrived too.
In the evening we were joined for dinner by Edward, Lord Montagu and his then wife Fiona,
Clodagh and Jason’s landlords and neighbours at nearby Beaulieu, Fiona being a school-friend of
Clodagh’s. David and I had met said Lord many time during our partying years in London during
our early twenties and so, as circumstances dictated, we slipped seamlessly into another
evening’s in-closet conversation which entirely avoided any references whatever to being gay,
chatter eminently suitable no doubt to the Tim Currys of the world.
Cheap shot, Dais. Don’t go there.
It rather shocks me to have to quantify the secretive, dissimulating that bisexuals and secret-
sexuals expect from their friends and acquaintances. It is so often merely assumed that we will
be acquiescent and compliant as we are drawn willy-nilly, always without even being asked, into
their web of deceit, carefully having to avoid all mention of ploys which have been carefully
engineered as to always be outside and above wifey’s (or the general public’s) radar.
Then, as I felt twenty-seven years later when I was next to dine with Edward Montagu chez
Robin Miller, I was unable to suppress my feeling that Edward is demonstrably something of a
cheat. As a benchmark icon for many British gays due to the public naming, shaming and the
subsequent frenzy of publicity surrounding his imprisonment for ‘messing about with boys’, I
should have perhaps held him in some reverence. Instead, I can find no sincere heroic adjective
pertaining to Edward in my gay lexicon and of the whole affair I most remember one journalistic
wag’s pronouncement, capitalising on Edward’s misfortune: “ … that he left England under a
cloud no bigger than a choirboy’s hand.” Edward became a bit of a joke.
His subsequent double-life - married man and homosexual -which doubtlessly brought him
whatever it was he sought and which he pursued, has always thrust my single, one dimensional
life under a spotlight of analysis. I think it has something to do with being Congregationalist and
middle class whereas Edward was an aristocrat and Church of England. I remember the fate of
Malvern’s own Earl Beauchamp who also made a life for himself in exile having been
discovered and disgraced, presumably to appropriately assuage public and family outrage. It was
a reality assumed by Evelyn Waugh who used the matter for his fictional purposes in writing
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED.
Edward Montagu’s own faux pas was and is obviously no dilemma. Had I followed
Edward’s path, my life would have been intolerable to me. But my uncharitable thoughts towards
this otherwise quite fascinating dinosaur are just uncharitable thoughts and when I saw him last,
my thoughts were merely that he was also a rather old and floundering dinosaur heading, if not
for extinction, then at least fossilization. He died in 2015.
Back at Homewood, the year ended, strangely, with everyone trying harder. Jan was trying
to be more affable and sociable, Ed and I went for several days without major altercation and we
discovered that we weren’t, as the Little Britain team would have it, the only gays in the village.
Beneath our noses, a poof had appeared at Freshford post office at the bottom of the hill, the sort
of poof that everyone loves because the ladies find him so funny and amusing. Like John Inman
or Larry Grayson. Stereotypical and entirely unthreatening, NOT like us stuck-up queens at the
top of the hill, playing all grand and rich and … After all, WHO did we think we were? Certainly
not, as Little Britain might see us, ‘the only gays in the village’. Jan couldn’t wait for pension
day each week. She too thought the interloper ‘a real hoot!’
The next year, 1979, began very cold and with snow conditions which, according to the
national news, had our villages cut-off in serenely white isolation. I note that even Freddie
Mercury called to see if we were all right. I began to be very concerned about the state of our
horses which now had to be stabled. I felt bowed by the tasks of feeding and mucking out and
although those who visited, like Roberts Thomas and Cork, often helped, I knew that I was not
the right keeper of these demanding animals and I knew that they deserved better. Another load
of hay duly arrived from Toop’s of Frome.
As an antidote to Ed’s not working, I had developed a little idea with Robert Cork who was
desperate to make more money. Together we had dreamed up GOING OUT, a newspaper
version of London’s WHAT’S ON designed to cover both cultural events as well as clubs and
music venues in the West Country. Robert had produced a mock-up, we had elicited quoted
prices from several printers and I had had the temerity to approach Jim Beach to see if he could
advise us further on our business plan.
Indeed after a couple of meetings at West Overton, Jim proved more than ready to advise. It
was in the days when he was new on the QUEEN scene and was thus prompted by what Freddie
said and Freddie was never anything less than generous with help for his friends. In retrospect, I
rather feel that Freddie was Jim Beach’s perspective and that when Freddie died, Jim found, so to
speak, that the cuffs were at last off and any previous perspective morphed into a thruway to an
infinity of megalomania.
In those days, Jim Beach was a really nice man, enjoyable company and fired with a
refreshing idealism, fully shared by his wife Claudia. Together, in 1978, they had founded The
Solid Rock Foundation, designed to pick up the pieces of lives which had been in some way
injured by a life in the music business, whether that life belonged to a sound technician or a
roadie who had gone deaf or an artist whose promise had been compromised through drug use or
general misfortune. I really admired them for their attempt, especially in the light of the problems
weighing on Bob Stacey who had been Elton’s tour manager for so many of those early years. I
note that no other comparable organisation exists today and that private charity and individual
generosity is the only fall back for one of the music industry’s victims. Often, neither is
sufficiently forthcoming. Instead of wanting to help the wounded, in 2008 we read about the
troubles of Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse and Pete Docherty with an eagerness amounting
to obscene glee.
Ed’s and my attempts at being single men again seemed to be making some progress too,
even though the first foray into that world was a disaster, at least from my point of view although
I think Ed benefited from the incident with more than the rebuff meted out to me. Perhaps our
mistake was trying to be single men TOGETHER, at the same time.
This is the jist … David Fowler was a friend of Stuart Tovey, both of whom were doctors,
the former in Birmingham and the latter in Bristol. We had become friendly with the latter,
whom Ed had dubbed ‘Nurse’ Tovey and it was Stuart’s introduction to David and David’s
friend Jack Dervan which led to Ed and I mounting an expedition to Birmingham one Saturday.
Any interest I had had in said Jack was immediately quashed as he announced that he wanted to
be more than just friends with David Fowler and that he didn’t like ‘older’ people anyway. It
obviously had never occurred to said Jack that at thirty-two, I still considered myself young but I
bore his rejection with the typical wounded aplomb of a queen who’s publicly fallen flat on her
arse.
They both spent our evening with them at The Grosvenor House Hotel - Birmingham’s
answer to The Oasis - playing their home field rather than responding to the obvious signals from
Ed. I met Jack again, some twenty years later when he and I became neighbours in adjoining
streets in Islington although I have never, to my knowledge clapped eyes on Doctor Fowler
again. I rather went off him when someone told me that he had boasted that if he became Ed
Murray’s lover it would be on the condition that he was given a Porsche. I hope he displayed
more talent as a doctor than he did as a gold-digging tart!
I took off for London for a couple of days as Ed had said he would look after the horses and
the cats and I stayed with both Sarah at Elm Place and also with the Forbes family in Virginia
Water where I was able to make myself useful by helping to carry the thirteen year old Emma up
and down stairs. Poor little girl had broken her leg badly whilst tobogganing in the recent snow.
Not only was Emma feeling sorry for herself particularly as a great question mark now hung over
her plans to go to ballet school but Nanette was exhausted both physically and emotionally. So,
we all made the most of the bad time and in London I had rather a nice time and met lots of the
friends Sarah was accruing in the post-Reidian swathe she was cutting through café society.
Mark Phillips, Eric Hall, the agent Michael Somerton I knew and Eric Roberts, the black
American actor singer from the band SWEETFEED, a GOTHAM sound-alike concept, over
whom Edward Montagu had been so gushing in his gay time-off from being a Lord.
I well remember how SWEETFEED had wanted Barry Krost to manage them in the earlier
nineteen-seventies and indeed how they had mounted a brilliant full-frontal campaign which
involved Garth Bandell, the white member of the threesome band, fucking Barry Krost’s brains
out for a respectable length of time. Good try, guys. And then there was the entirely precious,
arrantly obnoxious Roddy Llewellyn who was several times drawn to Sarah’s coterie. It was at
the time when he was being, literally, a royal pain in the ass, before the worms turned and he
moved on from Princess Margaret to become a really nice guy. Such a cast of thousands was
Sarah’s late teenage, where she laid the foundations of her transatlantic reputation for keeping
one of the ‘best’ address books in London.
And then I went back home and all good things came, as they do, to an end.
I had been speaking to Ed on the ‘phone every day, rather enjoying our conversations and
pleased that he was at least trying to be on better terms with his mother. On January 14th, a
Sunday, I arrived back at Homewood at half-past-seven in the evening to find that Ed had gone
to Bristol. I was a little taken aback, given that he had known that I was coming home, had
already cooked for himself and his mother but had left nothing for me. There was nothing in the
fridge. No shopping had been done and … and I waited for Ed to return.
When he did so, he told me that he had been out every night I had been away. No problem
there except that he had, I was informed, been so drunk on each of these nights in the Oasis club
that on the third, James Carter, the barman, had offered to drive him home … Fine, except that
altruistic gesture meant that James would have had no means of getting back to Bristol. Fine
except James stayed the night. Fine except that the rules - Ed’s rules for it was he who had
instituted them - had been conveniently abandoned and James had eagerly submitted to the
ravishment to be found on the sharp end of the master’s substantial pork sword. Not fine.
To my certain knowledge, James had had a taste of the Scottish sausage on several occasions
but on this occasion, it was administered in rather swish domestic circumstances, such that for
many the moment turns from a passing shag into one of life’s opportunities, the merry cinq a
sept morphing into a serious love affair. All this sounds juvenile and trivial in 2005 although I
have to point out that even our vanilla lifestyle was considered remarkably avant garde in the
gay world of 1979. James had apparently stayed at Homewood most of the following day and Ed
had driven him home, back to work at the bar, in the evening.
I was deeply upset, not that Ed had screwed James Carter but that they had screwed in my
home, in my sheets whilst I was away, behind my back. My reactions were ballistic and the
fallout was terminal. Even though we immediately changed ‘the rules’, for me there were no
longer any rules to be broken. I realised that Ed was doing to me exactly what John Reid had
done to Sarah – I was being corralled into leaving. I was being prepared to make my decision,
inexorably fattened like a goose for Christmas slaughter. Ed was never going to tell me to go. He
knew very well that I would come to that point of my own volition. My mind cleared in one
sweeping reality check when he screamed back at me that ‘ … this is MY house and I will do
what I like in it!’ I hesitated to say that Homewood was probably more Jan’s than his. Had he
forgotten that he had used her money to buy the place? I think if I had so reminded him, he
would have killed me.
Later, nursing my wounds, made more raw by realising that I was still very, very fond of
this contradictory, awkward, infuriating man: “ … it (Ed’s pronouncement) has brought
home to me the fact that a relationship between two men, unprotected by law, is
in NO way like a marriage – ‘At the end of the line, what’s yours is yours,
what’s mine is mine.’ Homewood is NOT my house and never will be. It is supposed
to be my home but to make such a notion a cornerstone of my security is utter
folly.”
But still I didn’t go.
“Thursday 1st February … Saw the first snowdrop today. The scattering of fine
powdered snow remains. It was dangerous, the other day, to think of spring. It
brought false hope. Winter flattens everything – there is no bird song. All is
dead, rotted and tatted together in some frozen primeval embroidery. The dead
grasses weave a pall for the buried memories of last summer. As Ed said today,
‘We’ve really paid for the summer.’ But then, we pay for everything, don’t we?”
And somehow, I managed to finish my final draft of SHADOW IN THE GREEN, Micky
Hannah’s story and started on another novel, since long lost, which I learned today that I
provisionally titled AGGIE, BELLE and MABEL SMITH, an attempt to weave together three
fictional lives based on those of Ed’s Dundee ‘aunts’. When Peter Wood arrived, a month late to
reclaim Tabitha, suitably repentant and bearing a compensatory jeraboam of champagne, my first
couple of chapters had been written. But, somehow, without Tabitha, the work never re-started
and I never saw my lovely white princess again.
My journals record a plethora of new names, names of acquaintances whose identities, I am
ashamed to say, I have completely forgotten. John Fudge, Leslie Towers, Geoffrey Young …
Andrew Moreglia, a young music student incandescent with what girls used to called a ‘pash’ on
Robert Thomas. Who these people were, I now have no idea except that, other than Andrew, they
were older, I think, and that I liked them and that they liked us. I can put no faces to the names
from this period of my life, as though it was a time warp, a sort of kidnapping, the escape from
which led me, stumbling and blindfold, through a lost land.
Predictably, the provisional peace between Ed and I passed. We had a disastrous outing to
see Peter Straker in the Who’s dramatised TOMMY at the Queens Theatre. We had assumed,
rightly or wrongly, that Clodagh Wallace as Straker’s manager was to arrange our tickets. Too
late to stop Ed from leaving Homewood, I discovered that Clodagh had managed to procure only
twelve seats for twenty people but, in her words, that I wasn’t to worry as she had made sure that
it would be all right for eight people to stand at the back. Oh, Clo … I had been in and out of
theatres all my working life and I knew that fire regulations precluded ANYONE from standing
at the back.
I also knew that Ed would be standing for no one. I can’t blame him. He had begun to admit
to abdominal symptoms of a previously treated condition which would later require repeated
surgery. He refused at the time I knew him to have the matter investigated and merely drank
more to mask the symptoms. There was nothing I could do. This health situation as well as our
quotidian intake of alcohol underlay our daily lives. The TOMMY debacle was humiliating and
further deepened the rift between us.
Ed blamed me for the ‘wasted’ journey. The Glums drove back to Homewood in simmering
silence. On reflection, although I urged Ed frequently to see a doctor, he never went to any
effect. There was Gordon Atkinson in London who would have been pleased to see him,
someone who might have told us that he was suffering from perhaps anal fissure disease or even
diverticulitis, conditions which later in my life I was come to know in my later partner. Or, even,
cancer.
Ed, for some reason which lay unexplored between being drunk and being in pain, started
lying to me, creating alibis for being absent. ‘I’m just off to view Aldridge’s sale’ translated into
‘I’m just off to see James Carter.’ After the first flushing out of the serial lie, the subsequent
occasions didn’t bear dissection. I merely expected him to lie and thus let the lies lie. His mother
too was unhappy again, her interest in life sliding away to the point where she admitted to Ed,
when he asked why she didn’t interest herself more in the running of the house, that she
‘couldn’t be bothered …’ Jan’s nihilism and Ed’s retreat yet again from dealing with his own
reality as prime mover in the situation which encompassed all three of us brought on more
confrontations, accusations and recriminations. There wasn’t even any comfort in going to sleep,
knowing that when I woke in the morning, nothing would have changed. The first person in my
life, my supposed significant other, was ill and yet refusing to deal with himself. My very
helplessness contributed to my vulnerability.
I left Ed and Homewood first on the 15th February, after Ed had stayed out all night with
James Carter. He had thought he had had the decency to call in the morning: ‘Hello, it’s me, old
thing …’ Old thing, indeed. I couldn’t even speak to him and merely put the ‘phone down. I fed
the horses, fed the old lady and left. No dramatic notes of farewell. There was neither need nor
point. I just left.
“It IS the best thing – the only thing I CAN do. I know it won’t even provoke
him (Ed) into a panic, it won’t make him WANT me to come back, it won’t make him
even ask but at least it will free him and I from this life of hell that we’ve
created.”
In London, I stayed with Sarah who had begun to mix into her friendship with Mark Phillips
a mutually enjoyed ‘no strings’ intimacy. How sensible. Mark had just got his first record deal
and was feeling good … I saw Michael Golding several times, Michael Fish at his Embassy Club
and even saw David Meyer who was just beginning work on Derek Jarman’s THE TEMPEST. I
had dinner with Sara Randall and Sian Phillips, who was then married to Robin Sachs; Sian was
later, much later, to become a neighbour and a friend after her own acrimonious parting and
divorce. It seems that no one I have known has escaped being unceremoniously dumped at some
time or the other.
Sarah was courting a career as a journalist with RITZ magazine and her first subject was
Judy Carne, the English actress who had found celebrity in the nineteen-sixties American
comedy series, ROWAN AND MARTIN’s LAUGH-IN. Poor woman. That she only could have
had a tenth of the success subsequent to LAUGH-IN as enjoyed by both her co-stars Goldie
Hawn and Lily Tomlinson. By the time I met her, she was heavily into substance abuse and
looked like an eighty-year-old goblin. Sarah’s interview was excellent, objective, as kind as a
journalist could be and non-prurient and she was thoroughly and deservedly congratulated by
David Litchfield. Her next assignments were interviews with Baron Arnaud de Rosnay, a
romantic/macho young French adventurer with whom our friend Felicity Dean had once been
involved and thirdly Nona Hendrix from LABELLE. Sarah was on her way. So was poor
Arnaud. He was, some years later, fabulously lost on a solo sail-board crossing of the Pacific
Ocean and we all hoped that he had not died but instead done a ‘Lucan’, ‘done a runner’.
And Cassian Elwes entered upon the stage of my life. Sarah had known Cassian since
childhood and indeed maintained a huge regard for his mother, the interior decorator Tessa
Kennedy whose own teenage romance with the painter Dominic Elwes had long captivated
Sarah’s imagination. I really liked Cassian, recently come down from Harrow School after ‘A’
levels and beginning to find his way. Having been largely brought up under the aegis of his
stepfather, the film producer Elliott Kastner, he almost took it for granted that his future would
be in the film business. He wasn’t as social as Sarah, being shy and on occasion withdrawn but
he entered into her world by dint of their growing relationship, one which was as passionate as
any instance of young love. I found him kind, curious, generous of heart and spirit and I hope the
same great things for him that he hoped himself. I loved the way he would keep quiet if he had
nothing to say and assess the rest of the company, placing them before he emerged from his
corner to have his say. Only actors could be seen to bump into the furniture, not the producer.
And then, embosomed in this jeunesse d’oree, I went like a gambolling lamb back to
Homewood. Yet again. Do released convicts ever want to return to their prisons, just to see …?
There, to my surprise, I found a man who had really missed me.
Rather, Ed said he really missed me although he claused his compliment by saying that he
would never have lovers living with him in the house again and yet he said he wanted to ‘start
again’, that there was no reason for me to ‘run away’ from Homewood. Of course I interpreted
his expressions literally and together we spent a lovely night, waking in complete ‘synch’. We
knew each other too well to blow away all our shared knowledge of each other. However, I note
that I returned to London on 24th February because I had made plans to finally get us all to
TOMMY on my birthday on the twenty-sixth. The day before, I called Ed who told me that his
plans for the future were that, tentatively, he was going to turn Homewood into a hotel and bar.
My reaction was as all my reactions had been to his plans for his future:
“I suggested that I should therefore move out of the house and into the
cottage and he agreed. There was something in the air, something had changed in
Ed and I knew immediately that we weren’t on the same wavelength regarding the
‘starting again’ thing. Why want to start again when, without consultation, I am
expected to accept his off-the-wall plan to change the house which is my home
into a hotel and bar? I interpret that his meaning of starting again was as
friends, not as a ‘couple’. Poor Sarah – she must be going crazy with me. I
vacillate, I swing like a pendulum. I want to go back and yet I want to stay away
…”
The day after my birthday party I returned to Homewood for the last time and on finding Ed
drunk in the local pub, reluctantly offered to drive him when he declared that he is going to
Bristol, to the Oasis even though I knew I ran the risk of:
“ … possibly being humiliated in front of James Carter. Trouble is, James
doesn’t even look at me; he doesn’t even catch my glance. I return to the car
where I wait the best part of an hour whilst Ed presumably says his goodbyes. I
try to be cool; I can’t and I lose my temper. We get home and have the worst row
in history. He shouts, bawls, throws furniture about in the kitchen, crawls on
the floor and wants me to hit him. He rushes up to bed and I follow, there to be
told that he is indeed having an affair with James Carter; that he has fallen in
love and cannot help himself. He has not been able to bring himself to tell me. I
am sorry for him but now, at least and at last, I know. This is the reason why I
haven’t been able to get through to him, why he has become such a stranger to me.
His guilt has consumed him and the lies and deceit have almost made me lose
respect for him. But I LOVE him. That as far as I am concerned, conquers all. I
will try; but then I say I cannot and will not make promises but at least, now, I
know and can either come to grips with the situation or know why I am walking. We
even tape record our discussion. He is ashamed that we do it and on his
insistence, the tape is erased the next day.”
The following day he admitted that he has made a mess of things and that he was relieved
that ‘it’ is out in the open. I replied that ‘it’ is no one’s fault, ultimately and that even my
proverbial pig could walk out into the street any morning and possibly fall in love. It’s one of the
hazards of being human. Or being a pig. Often piggies can’t be choosers. I didn’t and couldn’t
blame Ed for falling in love – I maybe didn’t much go for the quality of the object of his
affections but I certainly didn’t want him to stop his affair. BUT, I also knew I couldn’t stretch
my love to accommodate James into the everyday life of our little community however much as I
would have liked to, that being the ultimate magnanimity. I even talked to Ed’s mother. The poor
woman was scared out of her wits. Ed’s wild schemes had hit at the very roots of the tiny amount
of security and self-esteem remaining to her because it had quickly become obvious that it was
James who had been told that he was to run Ed’s latest hotel project.
After that, Ed and I never argued again. At Homewood.
The end – yes, really - came on Friday 2nd March 1979, two days later.
“I don’t know whether or not it would be prudent to stop writing these
journals now. After all, I did put a full-stop to Homewood today, my home of
sixteen months. I woke myself from the best dream I ever had and I’d run out of
sleeping pills to keep me asleep. Dreams can’t exist when you’re awake. However,
there is one consolation and that is that I have this journal to read, to remind
myself that it did happen and that these pages will be my all-time favourite
book, probably the best I will ever write. Sarah said I should call the
collection HOMEWOOD BOUND. Ha ha!
I list that which I have gained over the past two-and-a-half years – new
knowledge, of gardening, antiques, cooking, entertaining, old people, love,
relationships, writing … I do not want to live at Homewood any more. It has all
been spoiled, the jewel is thrown in the mud and neither of us can pick it up. It
must lie there and disappear into the mire, maybe to be discovered again but only
by others and only in the future. These journals are the jewel … and today I will
start another book.
I awoke after a Mogadon-induced sleep and did not wake Ed up until ten-to-
nine. He had actually come back and not stayed with James … I went in with his
coffee and post. I just sat on the bed and waited for the answer I had requested
that Ed elicit from James as to what is happening. “How can I say at this stage
what will happen?” was James’s entirely unsatisfactory reply.”
I could not carry on under these circumstances. That Ed and James were in love was now
irrefutable. James must have had an opinion on what he would like to happen and as that wish
impinged on my life, I telephoned James and requested a face-to-face meeting at lunchtime at the
Elephant Pub in Bristol. He said he could not make it. I begged him to. He agreed. Ed declared
that it is all ‘creepy’.
“ … James arrives. He does not want to go to lunch. We sit and I tell him to
take care of Ed, to make him happy for as long as the affair lasts. James
mutters, continually: ‘It’s so sad, it’s so sad …’ I think to myself, ‘Too right
it’s fucking sad but it’s a little late for sad’. After wishing him well, I drive
back to Homewood and tell Ed the substance of the meeting. He agrees that it is
best that I go.
He mumbles about getting together again, buying a house together one day,
running a pub … He says he wants me to stay but I think he does so only because
he sees I have made my mind up to leave and I know I have to leave in order that
we all survive. I tell Jan that I am leaving and give her a letter with all my
possible whereabouts if she ever needs me and in any event to contact my parents,
who have already given me instructions ‘not to throw it all away again …’ I
wonder about the ‘again’ and to what ‘it’ they could possibly be referring.
I am sad to leave Rufus and Monty but I have nowhere I can take them and I
realise that I still love Ed although I couldn’t begin to explain what that
means. I just felt it. I still believe in love, honesty, friendship and also
being a gentleman. At least we parted friends. I don’t think it’s the end, I hope
it’s the beginning.”
Even then, as I drove away, down the long winding hill towards Limpley Stoke and
thereafter, I was still hoping. I carried on hoping for months …
 Chapter Sixteen

‘I lay awake for a long time before

I realised my heart was broken …’
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The drive up to London seemed not to take long at all. I had asked Sarah if I could come and
stay at Elm Place even though she and Cassian were away in New York, staying with Cassian’s
step-father Elliott Kastner. I hoped that Sarah was enjoying the visit. I had once heard Elliott
refer to her as a ‘ding-a-ling’. I don’t like my friends being called ‘ding-a-lings’ and particularly
not by one of the greatest ding-a-lings of all times.
When I got to number 5 Elm Place, Jamie Muir, John Brown and Sarah Toynbee were there
and asked me to go to the cinema with them. Sweet, kind people. Instead I went to Country
Cousin, drank a lot with Cherry and Lionel Blair (another ‘married’ man with a barely disguised
alternative agendum) and together we watched his sister Joyce and Tudor Davies in a dance
revue entitled STEPPING OUT WITH IRVING BERLIN which was tremendous.
But I slept an odd sleep that night. I remember closing my eyes to the sound of tropical seas
splashing on coral strands washing in my ears. There was a reason. I didn’t have stress-related
tinnitis. The Forbes family were going to Barbados at the end of the month and had sweetly
suggested that I might, in these new emotionally straightened circumstances, accompany them. I
accepted immediately and sent off a cheque for my airfare tout de suite. I note in those days, it
cost £233, not, even in time-adjusted terms, a huge amount of money but one which I thought
something of a splurge. But I realised that as well as helping myself I could also help with Emma
whose leg would still be fully plastered. I dreamed of the moment the plane would take us away.
I fell in with old and dear friends very quickly. Freddie asked me over to supper with him
and with Joe and Mary the following evening and it appears that David Minns was still
welcomed with open arms at Stafford Terrace because he also dined with us that night. It was a
very close and restorative evening, “ … strange and wonderful. Me, Freddie, Mary and
Minns all together with Freddie’s latest in-tow squeeze, Joe Fanelli. Odd for me
in that Freddie and Minns were the mainspring of my determination to get
‘something together’ with Ed. Mary, ‘outed’ by the gay syndrome, seems now to
refer to everyone as ‘she’ and to be really into the gay scene in general. I
wonder how much she does it just because she loves Freddie and yet how much she
secretly hates all his gay friends? I hope not because she has turned into a
great girl. Her beauty is not as insipid as it was. Her features are really very
good and she has a superb figure. For Minns, it must always be hard to sit in
that kind of company with Freddie. There must be so many memories – after all, he
helped to buy a lot of the things in the flat and at one point, of course, was
going to move in here (Stafford Terrace). Anyway, a great evening and I think we
all felt a little stronger for that re-enforcement of friendships. Privately, I
spoke of Straker with Freddie. He agrees that Clodagh Wallace is and has been the
wrong manager for Peter. I suggested that perhaps an American manager would be
appropriate now, someone who could take a completely new outlook on Straker’s
work and career, someone like Vincent Romeo and on a label like Casablanca which
would come out in England via the PYE label where our friend Derek Honey, the
managing director, had obviously most power. Freddie complimented me and said
that I would be a good manager for Straker. I said I’d been there. I’d quit.”
 Freddie and Mary Austin
This gesture was typical of Freddie’s concern for his friends in those days and, I suppose, to
many, my declining his invitation could appear churlish but Straker and I had had our time and it
hadn’t worked. Not only would accepting Freddie’s suggestion have been bad for me it would
have been bad for Straker too whose only fountainhead at that time was Freddie himself. The
phantom of cocaine had recently raised its spectre over my friends’ battlements and it was being
greatly enjoyed. Its use was permeating the whole of the music business and using cocaine not
only disinterested me, it repelled me. I really don’t like being intoxicated myself and intoxicated
people frighten me. My time with Ed had at least taught me something. My views and my style
of working beneath such a phantom’s pall would have been too firm for Straker to accept and he
would forever have been referring our matters of moment to Freddie who would then have had
the dilemma of referring such situations back to me and telling me to get on with my job and that
would have led to more than a possibility of friction between Freddie and I. Freddie had no
desire to be any sort of referee. No. As far as business was concerned, we’d all had our day …
Two days later, the ‘family’ reconvened. Freddie was taking us out to dinner to celebrate
Mary Austin’s birthday at SHEZAN in Cheval Place, his favourite restaurant. “ … and I took
some flowers round to Mary Mercury in the afternoon (For some reason I always
called her Mary Mercury) but I didn’t go in as I felt … well, I felt that I
wanted to get to know her better first. Went to Freddie’s about nine after Minns
had called for me. Mary, Freddie, Joe, me, Sarah Forbes, Sarah Harrison, Malcolm
(Carrick, Sarah H’s first and long-time boyfriend), Douglas and Petra (the
hairdresser and beautician respectively), Paul Prenter, Malcolm Grey, Gordon
Atkinson and his friend Roger. Not a particularly inspiring company but a lovely
party. Great big joints for those who were into them, champagne and then on to
SHEZAN. I took Sarah F away early as she had to go to REGINE to meet people. (A
nightclub on the roof garden floor of what had once been Derry and Toms
Department store in Kensington High Street, named eponymously after a very sorted
French woman). I went back to the party but wished I hadn’t as Freddie was
removing everyone to continue the celebrations at Legends. I didn’t want to go at
all and came back to Elm Place and went to bed. I woke up when Sarah and Cassian
came in and we talked about life and sex and other people’s lives and sex lives
for a long time. My heart still pounds when I am by myself and I think about
Homewood and Ed and WHAT A FUCKING WASTE OF TIME!”
 Freddie with his doctor and friend, Gordon Atkinson
The latter part of the nineteen-seventies was a wild and wonderful time for many people,
fuelled by lines of happy powder and clouds of giggle-smoke and yet I felt so outside the
euphoria, so not wild and wonderful. And how I could have written, in the extract above, ‘not
very inspiring company’, I have no idea. Perhaps I was beginning once again to alienate myself
and pushed away the efforts of others, well-meaning though such efforts might have been.
Perhaps it was the work of the depressive process, one which I now know to have a healing as
well as a sectioning or separating consequence. Quite simply, the mechanics of depression
separate you from the world which is causing you pain. But those consequences can be terminal
and I was not to come to terms with being able to handle and place my depression for twenty-
five years.
David Minns was one person about whom I began to feel uneasy. I can’t believe I’m writing
this. Even on a scale of ups and downs, he was my oldest friend. From what I wrote at the time, I
seem to have thought that he was siding with the enemy, with Ed. He always assured me that Ed
really had the highest regard for me and that one day the friendship could be reassumed. It was
an opinion I didn’t want to hear at the time as I was trying very hard to excise all thoughts of Ed
Murray from my thinking, even to exorcise the vacuum. But from David’s point of view, in his
current, post-kissy kissy relationship with Freddie whom he – despite what he since said – once
loved, there was obviously some kind of a future to be had with an ex-lover. David, I know,
meant well but it wasn’t an effort I could appreciate. Something about meat and poison and one
man’s tastes?
Over the course of those first mad March days away from Homewood, I must have been in a
sort of shock, numbed, because even though I mention Ed daily in my journal’s pages, I recorded
none of the aching and yearning and longing and fury and resentment and regret and loneliness
which characterised the rest of the month of March after the effects of the shock had worn off. It
was to be a long month before my date with Barbados and a life on a beach which I thought
would be the remedy. Thus, I spent the intervening weeks wandering around London, being
occasionally -no, often - promiscuous but whatever I did to fill my time, whatever displacement
therapy I grabbed, most of my thoughts were still at Homewood.
It was difficult to escape the place, to stand apart from the life I had enjoyed in the West
Country. In the pubs and bars and clubs, I continuously saw faces and recognised people I had
known in Bristol and I knew that their sighting of me would be duly reported and gossiped over
in the said clubs, bars and the pub.
My wretchedness, loneliness and frustration conspired deeper each day to bring me lower.
What writing I did was an attempt at rehabilitation rather than a constructive passion. I had wild
ideas for television series and film treatments and gave a couple to Howard Malin, Derek
Jarman’s producer at the time. He returned them, commenting that he found my work ‘schmalzi’.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had more encouragement from the dear Graham Tarrant who
was kinder but then he always has been a gentleman. I liked him and his wife Ros very much and
their home at Howley Place in Little Venice was always welcoming.
When Ed and I spoke on the phone, the calls were usually acrimonious. Any enquiry about
the cats elicited the accusation that I was being accusatory. I made no enquiry about who, if
anyone, had moved in to the house since my departure to help with its running, although I was
greatly concerned for the welfare of the three horses. Moves which I had set in train before I left
ultimately paid off when Ed finally managed to persuade a local horsewoman to buy the three
horses which, together, fetched £850 and absolved Ed of a great deal of unwanted work and me
of a barrowful of unwanted extra guilt. Penny, Beckie and Tina could now, hopefully live a nicer
and more deserving life. They had been bought originally for £1400. It had been an expensive
experiment in the equine. Ed generously said that he would send the cheque to me, that he didn’t
want the money himself although when the cheque arrived, it was faulty and he would have
nothing to do with correcting the mistake. That was cause for further vicious recrimination
although the cheque was finally honoured.
I was still more than mindful of all the possessions that I had left behind and it became clear
that I would have to return to Homewood to begin the process of assembling them in a place
where a carrier could load them and remove them. I made that first journey back to Homewood
with my father as I had spent a few days in Malvern with him and my mother. One of my
conversations with Ed preparatory to this visit had ended with his saying that if I as much as set
foot in the house when he was not there, he would view the visit as trespass and that I would be
‘breaking and entering’, that he was not covered for insurance in case anything was broken. They
were more than wounding remarks. I had been the one to help him in renewing the insurance
policies. Was he really afraid that I would take something that wasn’t mine? Breaking up is
indeed, as Little Golda Disc from the Brill Factory once wrote, very hard to do … But why he
was obviously finding it so hard was a mystery to me. I thought he’d wanted me to leave?
 On that grey, lowering morning when dad and I arrived at the agreed time of ten-fifteen, Ed
was not answering his door. We were left to wait and wait, wondering if Ed was even at home. I
was also wondering who was at home with him but for once I managed to keep my mouth shut
and we thus avoided that subject. Eventually he appeared and without even offering us a cup of
coffee, we walked through the rooms of this house which had once been my home and agreed on
the ownership of the objects in question. There is no stranger feeling than experiencing
familiarity one step removed, like seeing your life through plate glass. My cats came and greeted
us and I fear I succumbed to a tear or two as I petted them, knowing that I could only rely on
Ed’s being kind and keeping them as I had nowhere else to take them.
Although, quite frankly, I wanted to punch his lights out, I managed to remain merely
silently distressed that Ed was so ill-mannered towards my father who had been such invaluable
assistance in Ed’s various building projects over the past sixteen months. I also thought it
unforgivable that Jan didn’t at least make an appearance to greet my father. But, with hindsight,
why should an old lady have put herself at risk of being further embarrassed? Furthermore, I
should in my turn have been much more appreciative of my father’s presence that morning, as
the atmosphere between Ed and I that day was never less than ugly. Since that day, I have always
been sympathetic to either party involved in a crime of passion. Neither have I, since, felt such
hatred.
We left, having agreed a date and time when I could return with a van and remove my stuff
and Ed, rather than having me help with the collection, said that he would assemble the catalogue
of items himself ‘when he had time’ as he obviously didn’t want us in the house a moment
longer than necessary.
On the way back to Malvern, my father and I were both silent although he offered to pay for
my flight to Barbados for which I was truly grateful. As usual, there were no words he could
either find or use to express any personal feelings about my situation although I can only suppose
that our mutual silence and his unqualified offer regarding the air fare was supposed to
communicate his sympathy. In truth, although I always hoped for different, I was not surprised
by his silence. I can only imagine what he was thinking and that he felt incapable to either face it,
discuss it, empathise … The time had long passed when an intimacy between us could have been
created. I can remember thinking how grateful I was for his assistance yet so, so sorry for his
emotional impotence because it affected us all, each of his three children.
Whilst in Malvern, I mentioned to my parents that I would be grateful to be able to occupy
one of the properties in my grandfather’s Trust portfolio as I needed a home and for the moment
had chance of no other. I don’t think I had realised that my notion of such a re-location involved
returning to Malvern. Malvern was, after all, the place from which I had escaped. The anomalies
were thankfully over-looked and my parents were acquiescent and said that when an appropriate
property became available, they would give me first refusal. My mother even displayed a certain
pleasure at the thought of being able to help me, in the American idiom, ‘fix the place up’. My
father, I fancy, had his own thoughts on this prodigal return although, as expected, he kept these
to himself. I was only to be told of them, by someone else, much later.
I returned to London where Sarah’s relationship with Cassian had at last kindled and they
were unmistakeably in love. Well, at least in lust. I was very fond of them both, individually and
as a couple. Cassian’s rough edges, those vulnerable unsophisticated bits of him which he
couldn’t disguise despite his superficial worldliness and ‘cool’, made him all the more charming.
He was inquisitive, affectionate even and more than anything was greedy for knowledge about
life and how it is lived. One evening, because he wanted to know about my gay life, he even
followed me to Earls Court and shadowed me as I went from the pub on one side of the road to
the pub on the other and then hung around after hours waiting for the evening’s encounter …
Neither of us were to be disappointed that night. He got his knowledge and I got laid.
I wrote the following morning: “… a day interspersed with some very funny moments
(sic) but all in all I don’t know how long I can go on feeling like this.
Something has to happen to me or I’ll just have to make something happen to me
which will be a total disaster just as all the decisions I have ever made have
all turned out to be disastrous … Sometimes I feel a million miles high and at
others a million miles deep. Somewhere in between is a reality which I struggle
for and yet cannot find.”
And yet my world, via my temporary residence with Sarah, was filled with an extraordinary
stream of extras and passers-through. Her journalism was bringing her into contact with the
movers and shakers of contemporary café and show-business society and she was loving her life.
And who comprised this jeunesse d’oree which hit my spot? There was Adam Ant (aka
Stuart Goddard) trying to be an actor, Cassian’s ex-Harrovian friends, Khaled Tajir, the Gulf (I
think) prince and David Straker-Smith, a ginger boy who would have been much better off gay.
Simon Turner, the actor and singer who tried being gay and turned it down in favour of … I
forget. I think he married. There was John Dodds, Cassian’s partner in a film venture entitled
TIME ENOUGH, Mark Phillips and his girlfriend Sarah whom he was later to marry. And of
course Felicity Dean who had been Sarah’s companion at the time of the Edinburgh Festival and
who was busy being a very busy working actress. She had gone out to the theatre of the country
and had proved herself, lately appearing at the Manchester Exchange Theatre in Edward Pinero’s
THE SCHOOL MISTRESS. Although I had seen her a couple of times at Homewood when she
had visited for the day with Sarah, she had grown up so much more in the two years since I had
first met her and her face displayed a more mature and intriguing quality. If only Gwyneth
Paltrow hadn’t come along … But whatever, I was to get to know her even better as our time
wore on.
But it was Sarah and Cassian in whom I found the greatest inspiration: “It is only the
young who give (me) any hope or consolation. They (Sarah and Cassian) grow and
develop and form their platforms for the ultimate jump into the very deep waters
surrounding them. Their morality is so strong and yet so flexible and they think.
They also act - sometimes foolishly but they will come to no harm, not with their
qualities – Greatness of heart, the will to learn and understand. Such fabulous
wealth which makes the men and women who possess it so rich and those who lack
it, so poor.”
And of course, there were my own friends, wonderfully supportive and desperate that I
should not flounder and be so unhappy. The Lees, Caroline and Robert, still living at Mount
Vernon in Hampstead, Rosie Samwell-Smith, Cherry Brown and Bryan and Nanette, my
benefactors … And, Sara Randall who tempted me hither and thither for evenings in the theatre,
to one of which, a production by Stephen Hollis at his Watford Palace Theatre of SIDE BY SIDE
BY SONDHEIM, Sarah Forbes and I went, each wearing one of a pair of outrageous, dangly
diamante earrings. It was, I beg to point out, the time of ‘glam rock’. My alumna and ex-drama
society friend, Penny Cherns, had directed the musical and it was heart-warming to see her again.
She was at that time one of Sara’s clients, many of whom had turned out that night to cheer on
their friends and stable mates. Brian and Carole Murphy were two. I liked Carole a lot and was
devastated when a few years later and after a long marriage, I heard that Brian had left her for
another love. Why couldn’t he have just bought a Ferrari and booked a hooker?
The cosmos works in very strange ways, none stranger than on the evening before I was due
to drive back to Malvern. Inexorably, the day approached when I had to prepare for the
collection of my stuff from Homewood, an expedition I would have to launch from Malvern as it
was the only place where I could arrange storage. I was surprised and pleased and relieved that
my brother Richard offered to come with me to help. It was one of only a handful of occasions in
our lives when we have been at all fraternal. I wish I could discern of which of us that admission
is an indictment. Before I left London I went for a drink at The Coleherne. There I saw George
Elas, Ed’s previous partner …
“He (George) didn’t speak to me; in fact he walked right past me. As I had
realised lately that what I am going through at the moment is exactly what he
went through almost three years ago, I HAD to go and speak to him, just to say
that I was ‘sorry’. (Such an inadequate word; should be expunged from the
dictionary) and that what had happened had happened because I was not entirely
aware of the situation which existed between he and Ed. In other words, I
realised that what Ed must have told me about George, and George about me was
exactly what he had told James Carter about me and me about James Carter; i.e. Ed
had fitted the facts to suit his view of our situation in the same way that it
had suited him to tell me that he and George were now ‘just good friends’. In
George’s case this bald basis was compounded with Ed’s perspective that he and
George were just business partners and that George wanted to move south to London
both for the ‘business’ reason and also that there was no ‘life’ for them in
Scotland.
After I had blurted out all the above, George replied, “And I STILL love him,
David …”
Trouble with Ed is that he can never believe that people love him and nor does
he realise that to let someone love you involves a mutual responsibility. I saw
now. I understood and I swear on everything I hold sacred that had I known about
the REAL situation that existed between Ed and George as George saw it, I would
have pulled out immediately.
Hence, for the wrongest of wrong reasons Ed and I got together and I made
those wrong reasons appear to me to be right ones. No wonder Ed couldn’t handle
my righted wrong reasons and merely reverted to type as soon as my successor
appeared and behaved to me in exactly the same way he had behaved towards George.
So now, as well as George, Ed has someone else who still loves him … Except
that mine is a somewhat different love in that I cannot even bear the thought of
sharing my love for Ed, I cannot bear the thought that there is someone else who
loves him too. Therefore I will not become another George, even if the price is
to forfeit the past months at Homewood, a time too beautiful and a time that will
never come again, a time that no one will be able to unlock, that will not be
looked at again on those occasions when you need the highest lift and the
greatest joy.”
Twenty-seven years later, the tenor and tone of an e:mail correspondence best describes the
man I left. Ed’s writing was prompted by my e:mailing him concerning a snail-mail
correspondence he had initiated with Geoff Cundy, my parents’ neighbour when they were alive.
Geoff was becoming confused and distressed at Ed’s enquiries about my parents and my sister
had asked me to contact Ed to ask him to stop writing. I wrote this:
dear ed,
i have been asked by my sister, to whom your letter to my parents’ neighbour of 26th february
was passed, to reply, hence this e:mail. i’m not quite sure why you wrote the letter or what it is
you want to know. simply put, my father died on april 16th 2004 only a few weeks after my
mother died on december 29th 2003. if you have any enquiries concerning either of my parents, i
would be grateful if you would bother me rather than elderly neighbours who become very
concerned at unusual correspondence and i as much as they can most easily answer your
questions.
i do hope that life is tolerable for you.
best wishes
dais
The following day, Ed replied in lengthy terms. Please bear in mind I had not been in contact
with him for some thirteen years. He had decided that my e:mail tone had been aggressive and
‘belligerent’ and used the occasion of his reply to lay out his ‘case’ against me. He pilloried me. I
have been advised not to reproduce his reply verbatim as he drew entirely innocent people into
his diatribe of hate which I found cruel and deeply wounding, as indeed I was intended. I decided
not to engage in any tit-for-tat reply and thus put up no ‘defence’. But I was confused as to why,
after so many years, that my former partner still felt so inimically towards me. I was under the
impression that I left him because we were both unhappy and that he had a chance of
establishing a relationship with someone else. I asked for nothing. I thought he wanted his
freedom and I was in a position to give it to him. He had engineered my departure, provided the
circumstances in which it was I who left, not he who ordered my leaving. He was off the hook in
many ways, scot-free, to further torture a pun. His e:mail to me was puzzling – his persistent
dislike of me was a strange way to acknowledge my acquiescence.
I therefore replied merely to confirm my parents’ given names and to ask that this should
conclude the correspondence. An hour later, Ed replied, thus:
David,
I am in receipt of your further mail, this morning.
Form my letter to you, of yesterday’s date, you will, I hope, find that I made matters
unvarnishedly clear to you, as far as the needless concern of your late Father’s neighbours, and
as adeptly explained in Paragraph Seven, Sentence Four, and in the Third, last Sentence. I had a
perfectely understandable conversation with this neighbour, by telephone, who had been kind
enough to telephone to me, rather than to write. To reiterate, my second letter was only to ask if
he knew your Father’s given Christian name, nothing more than that, as you well know.
As has always been the case and your need, you have too much time on your hands, so required
to create the proverbial mountains out of mole hills, in an attempt to reduce your tedium and, of
course, for the next novel piece of tittle-tattle, the certain requirement of any lounge lizard of
long standing.
I will fondly remember your parents on the occasion of my sixty third birthday, on the 16th of
April.
No reply is expected nor is one desired.
Ed.

Ouch!
 Chapter Seventeen

“Thus, sex remained in his mind as a

solitary act committed in an abandoned
universe – it was always an act of terrific
optimism.”
JOHN IRVING, The World According to Garp

I have always been amazed at how quickly life moves. In April 1979, mine virtually segued,
seamlessly, into its next phase. Not that there was an absence of longuers, no lack of dull
moments contemplating featureless horizons although to experience these on a palm-thronged,
coral-stranded tropical island like Barbados with friends of great moment would seem to indicate
my utter lack of gratitude to cosmic bounty. But, y’know, when all is said and done … It
wouldn’t have mattered where I had gone. I was reminded of an aphorism concerning Dusty
Springfield who had just been introduced to Nina Simone. “I don’t think she liked me,” Dusty
said with usual self-doubt and deprecation. “Honey,” someone assured her, “Nina Simone don’t
like nobody …”
Writing in 2005, whose early winter months were spent there, I can maintain my belief that
Barbados is not somewhere I could ever call home. Some call the place charming; it’s more like
Cornwall, more like England than England, some say; it’s like England forty years ago, others
cry, although I would observe that I wouldn’t want to live in the England of forty years ago,
hidebound by religious bigotry and mediaeval attitudes towards everyone’s freedoms. In the
England of forty years ago, Princess Margaret was denied marriage to the man she loved, the
homosexual men who entertained her mother at weekend house parties at Royal Lodge Windsor
were being hunted by police and detained for periods that in no way increased Her Majesty’s or
Her other Majesty’s pleasure and unmarried pregnant women were being cast out of their
families to endure life’s only meaningful moment alone and confused and frightened; it was an
England of suppression and hypocrisy, of double standards, cruelty and exploitation of the poor
and underprivileged. Ok. Plus ca change…
In the event, Sarah didn’t want to leave Cassian behind in London and I felt uneasy and
unsettled as I had nothing to return to England for although I knew I had no alternative but to
return. Emma missed her friends and despite her being carried bodily by me into the sea as often
as she wanted, she was never far away from disaster, especially the day when, holding her in my
arms, we were attacked by an all but invisible cloud of stinging sea mites which left her itchy
and me totally ravaged by their virulence. Overall, I think Bryan and Nanette had a nice time,
specially after our first day when we decided to leave the hotel into which we had booked and
move next door to Settlers Beach, a collection of apartments and villas built on the sea shore in a
horseshoe shape with a bar and restaurant and pool at its centre. Later, I discovered that our
friend Gordon Spead, even in those days, owned one of the villas.
At Settlers Beach, we were quite happy, eschewing the culinary efforts offered by the
restaurant and either cooking for ourselves or venturing out to the very few restaurants the island
sported. Bryan prepared us wonderful sandwiches for lunch, each one a masterpiece of
originality and design, no two being of the same shape or size or contents, the latter being
usually of the ham and cheese variety. They splurted mayonnaise in unpredictable directions as
soon as they were picked up but they were generous and delicious and as neither Nanette nor I
had to cook or prepare them, we were more than satisfied and truly grateful. In the evenings, we
were occasionally invited out, the Forbes being enormous celebrities. We went on one evening to
the home of the island’s foremost white general practitioner whose name, I think, was Leacock.
Theirs was a beautiful house set high inland with a wonderful view over the sea and of course,
wherever we were, the flora abounded. With such fertility, I have always been amazed how little
Barbados provides for itself in the way of variety.
Date palms, birds all over and around them gorging on the red berries, travellers palms, huge
mango trees, royal palms, scarlet-flowering flamboyantes from which hang the long, black seed
pods which when shaken make the onomatopoeic shak-shak noise by which name the trees are
locally known, giant mahogany trees, Jericho roses with their voluptuous yellow blossoms, sago
palms some whitened with the current mildew rash of disease, cerise-flowering bauhinia trees,
giant stands of bamboo, fish-tail palms, dracenae, tree trunks wound around and around with
giant-leafed creepers … the island is a veritable arboretum. However, while I’m at it, I have to
remark that I didn’t and still don’t like Caribbean flowers at all. Anthurium reminds me of a
dog’s dick sticking through a nauseously green nylon sheet; heliconia brings to mind comatose
crabs hanging upside down in the swelteringly hot kitchen of a Chinese restaurant awaiting
immersion in a cauldron of mortally boiling water; strelitzia are the same except, with them in
mind, I think rather of lobsters in the same parlous state as the crabs; finally, ginger lilies are just
bloodied lambs tails, sheared off and attached to a green pole, dangling there pour encourager
les autres.
The thought that these botanical wonders have anything else but an architectural use in that
they form a sort of Baroque structure to the apparatus of island floral decoration is merely the
vaguest. They were a long way down the line on the day God was doing ‘pretty’. I admit that I
feel sorry for them but still don’t want them at my party.
And there were wild things, too. We saw monkeys, mongooses - no, not mongeese - families
of almost feral, thin kitties, birds like the black Antillian Grackles with that lovely petrol sheen
on their pure black feathers and a very distinctive cry - ‘Yeah, right?’ -several different varieties
of doves adorned with soft, mushroom-coloured plumage, bats who always seem to come out
bang on the dot of sunset. There were mice although I didn’t let on about them to the Forbes
ladies and whole establishments of geckoes and lizards who run out across the walls in search of
anything silly enough that has landed there. We loved seeing the almost black humming birds
which grazed the nectar on the hibiscus blooms which were fully in season and the LBJs (little
brown jobs) which resemble finches or sparrows, were always a delight. And the spiders, of
course! One night there was a huge one in the loggia. Sssshh! We had toads in the ponds and
creeks which bordered the property and these venture out at night, great big jobs with warty
backs.
And, not that she had anything to do with warty backs, there was Verna Hull who visited
often and who invited us to her home nearer Speightstown. I have spoken of Verna before, in
APPOINTMENTS when I was last on the island. Women like Verna seem not to exist anymore.
Or maybe it is that I no longer recognise them as being that different from the person I have
since become? Maybe it’s people like me who are the Verna Hulls of today, 2005, keeping the
torch of eccentricity and individuality alive and aloft? But, don’t write in …
I remember Newman and I experimenting with breadfruit and with the ubiquitous flying fish
although even our limitless imaginations were stymied by the bewildering lack of produce
available in the shops. I can’t remember if the supermarket in Holetown was even built in those
days but I remember being as amazed as I was twenty-five years later that the markets could run
out of chicken and tonic water and basic salad stuff. Most if not all food was imported from
America and Canada by air and it cost, as it did in 2005, a disproportionate arm and a leg. Herbs,
other than the conglomerate spice powder referred to as ‘curry’, were unheard of.
Our stay, most significantly, was marked by Bryan having just finished his novel which was
ultimately to be called THE ENDLESS GAME although at the time Elton, whose idea the title
was, hadn’t yet thought up the title and I forget what the novel was called. However, I was asked
to read the manuscript which had accompanied us and I cannot remember having such
attendance danced upon me as Bryan sat at my shoulder throughout my reading of it, falling with
ravenous attention upon every smirk I made, every chortle and chuckle, every facial tick and
flicker as I read his powerful novel, a book I thoroughly enjoyed and which I still feel is his best.
Next door were staying two other current celebrities, the singer Matt Munro and his family
and the sports broadcaster David Coleman although whether he was en famille, I remember not.
Neither could have been more different. Matt Munro was chilled out, laid back and his daily
exercise involved no more strenuous exercise than frequenting the bar. Coleman was almost
manic in his enthusiasm and bounced about all over the place. Exhausting. Michelle Munro,
Matt’s daughter, hung around a lot of the time. She was a sort of wannabee. She wanted to be a
singer like her father but it was an ambition which wasn’t underscored with current music
business acquaintance which did not surprise me. Her father’s world in which she had grown up,
had had nothing to do with ‘the new music’, the post-Beatles era. Matt’s musical pedigree had
been formed from the era of the big bands and the ballrooms and like the Kathy Kirbys and the
Alma Cogans and the Lita Rozas and the Helen Shapiros, all supremely gifted singers, their
careers having gravitated almost by accident to recording success. Michelle Munro was one of
the first to realise that it was no longer enough to be a great singer. The world is full of great
singers but there were only just so many working men’s clubs and summer shows and television
variety spots to accommodate them. Did Matt ever make it to Las Vegas? With agents like
Harold Davison around and all those heavy Jewish/Italian connections, it wouldn’t surprise me to
know that he had. But Matt’s was a world that had passed me by and although he was really
good company, in my perspective he didn’t figure in my rock’n’roll/singer-songwriter pantheon.
And so time came to shake the sand from our shoes, pack and fly home on Saturday 14th
April. That auspicious date was to figure again in my life but to say when and why would be, at
this point, an excess of information … Dear reader, I still want you to feel somewhat sorry for
me.
It was Easter Day when we got back and guess what the bunny brought me the day after our
return? John Reid, once again. His little angry yellow car was parked outside the Coleherne pub
in Earls Court on bank holiday Monday. After the usual badinage and much giggling with Neil
Carter his assistant, the very drunk Mister Reid asked me to return to work for him. I thought for
a moment - just a moment - and surrendered without any resistance, negotiation or hesitation. I
said ‘Yes’ and immediately felt that a heavy load had been taken from both my mind and my
body. I felt as though I could live again, that I had indeed been rescued at the last moment. The
future had been too lonely to contemplate. I missed Homewood with a physical ache. Its very
soil had become a part of me and I felt that although I was not wanted back there, that a part of
me had never left. I needed another, even bigger, project to eclipse the past.
But I should have thought harder about Reid’s proposal. I should have asked what I was
being employed for, what position I would occupy, what new plans John had. But the bibulous
Bank Holiday atmosphere of the Coleherne pub was nowhere to discuss such detail, matters
which to me were all but irrelevant and I said my goodbye with the assurance that Neil would
call me in the course of the next few days and that I was to start work the following Monday.
Reactions to this development in my life were several and varied. Sarah was delighted –
anything to bring her closer to Reid again was good. Cassian thought I was being incredibly
stupid and told me so. Anyone with musical ambitions was in favour – Reid still had the Midas
reputation even though he had lost QUEEN. The Forbes, understandably I suppose, were not
thrilled although some might observe that the chapter of the frustrated wedding plans was not
entirely of Reid’s writing. My parents were pleased and confessed that they had never been able
to ‘see me’ as a writer.
However, I seem to have made it clear to them that I did not want my working in London to
stall plans for my occupying one of the Trust’s properties. I had every intention of having a
residence in Malvern. It was an instinct I should have maintained for the next twenty-five years
as I could have saved an enormous amount of Capital Gains Tax. But rash decisions and hasty
hearts … If I have suffered from any complaint throughout my life, it has been a combination of
impulse over intellect. Alternatively, as my Yorkshire granny used to say, ‘Thought thought he
had and found he hadn’t …’ Too much thinking can sometimes blind a man to opportunity. I
must mention too that my brother Richard, then not as deeply mired in what is now diagnosed as
bi-polar syndrome as he was to become, had even found me a cooking job in Malvern at The
Swan Inn at Newland where he was a regular customer. I was grateful for his support and I
would like to say that I am at great pains to figure out just exactly when and how our relationship
deteriorated so badly in the years to come. Maybe I shall never know and maybe it is right that I
don’t? I too suffer from a recurrent depression which probably figures somewhere on the Bi-
Polar scale.
I went to two concerts that waiting week. At Elton’s in Oxford, Captain (less-than) Fantastic
performed alone except for the assistance of Ray Cooper who both acted as well as adding his
inimitable percussion. I was surprised that Elton was still playing solo concerts, two years after
the debut at the Playhouse in Edinburgh and I felt that he should now be performing with a band.
But Ray knew exactly when to shine and when to wane and the show was excellent. Elton had
indeed become a legend, just as Bryan Forbes had predicted in his documentary film some years
before. The audience adored him and he will certainly take their hearts with him to his grave as
they will take his songs to theirs. Oddly, I didn’t go backstage as there seemed to be no one from
either John Reid’s or Harvey Goldsmith’s offices around. I merely basked in the fading glow of
memory that it had been my efforts and ideas which had enabled Elton to achieve that first solo
concert at Edinburgh’s Playhouse. Sadly, the accolade he paid me from the stage that night had
proved neither bankable nor negotiable.
The other concert was Kate Bush’s two-and-a-half hour show at the London Palladium
where, amongst others, I saw David Croker, the managing director of Elton and John’s Rocket
Records whose attitude towards me was one which hinted at suspicion and lacked any
enthusiasm in the notion that we might once again be working together. References were made to
the ‘feelings’ of Alex Foster, my previous secretary who had ‘assumed’ my position after I left.
She herself had found herself a place in the long line of people whom Reid had dismissed. I
returned to Elm Place with a nagging worry nibbling at the edges of my tomorrow.
Friday was to prove my doubts well-founded. Neil Carter telephoned with an instruction that
I was not to turn up for work on Monday until John had spoken to me over the weekend.
Needless to say, Saturday and Sunday passed without a word and so did Monday and Tuesday
and all the other days and suffice to say that I neither saw nor heard from John Reid again for
months. To proclaim that I was once again cast down would be the understatement of the year
and I berated myself, castigated my luck, mentally flagellated myself with whatever reasons I
could contrive for my cursed fate.
As an anaesthetic, I fairly hurled myself into an orgy of promiscuity which I pursued in and
around Earls Court, on Wimbledon Common and within its thickets and copses, in Brompton
cemetery beneath the gravestones and behind the mausoleums of many an eminent Victorian,
anywhere that sexual pleasure might obliterate my other thoughts of failure, my sensitivity to
being rejected yet again and the deep, deep ache in my heart whenever I saw or heard anything
which reminded me of Homewood and Ed … But there was never any escape. When I saw
David Minns, we inevitably talked about Ed. When I saw Cherry Brown who very generously
offered me a job at Country Cousin, we talked about Ed. These people had become his friends
too …
One of my sexual encounters in that period was with Robert Dirskovski who worked in
those days for a publisher, Heineman perhaps? Maybe Weidenfeld? He was, to my eyes as one
might describe now, really cool. He was very worldly and authoritative and beside him, my own
mind-set and maturity withered into a dithering, blathering wet thing. What he must have thought
about my temerity when I revealed my ambitions to be a writer I know not. But he was at least
nice enough not to blow my pretensions out of the water and even allowed me some
encouragement.
It was about the time I met Robert that, via Sara Randall, I received the first rejection for my
novel, A SHADOW ON THE GREEN which was in those days still entitled LEAVE HIM TO
HEAVEN. It wasn’t an ‘out of hand’ rejection although I have forgotten just how many more
submissions I made. I was still supposedly writing DEAD AND FALLEN HORSES, a novel
about the Murray family’s life in Dundee although being apart from Ed had rather caused the
dead horses to decompose even faster. But Robert had a boyfriend, didn’t he? I was cast once
again in a role of convenience and made to realise that there were no further expectations to be
entertained other than the usual post-coital sigh of satisfaction and a quick look at the watch.
Ill luck hadn’t finished with me just yet. Late one night spent with David Minns and others
at Elm Place, reluctantly, I had seen my way to agreeing to drive him home to where he was
lodging in Regents Park with John Gordon Jones. At the intersection of Sussex Gardens and the
Edgeware Road, an uninsured driver of a much more solid car, ploughed into my little white
mini-van and ‘totalled’ it.
Shocked and distraught, I watched as David Minns left me in the middle of Edgeware Road
to find his way back home and I, wretched, watched as my dear little van, at the contrivance of
the AA, was towed away to some remote car hospital in North London where it would remain
un-doctored for several long weeks. It was the best part of a year later that that same august
institution, the Automobile Association, finally and miraculously somehow secured the insurance
payment which enabled me to offer to repay my mother for the loan necessary to repair the van.
It cost the crippling amount of £1080 to repair. It hadn’t cost much more when new but a garage
knows when they have a customer with only third party insurance over a barrel …
And in my car-less London life, it seemed I could and would never escape the shadow of Ed
Murray, in no less a guise than the inconvenient appearances of his once-lover, once-business
partner George Elas who turned up on cue to confuse any success I might have been temporarily
enjoying in the struggle to forget the lover we had shared. I reproduce verbatim a conversation
one evening in the Coleherne pub:
“Hello, David,” he said, “how are you?”
“Oh … Bearing up I suppose. (Pause) Actually I’m still fucking miserable.”
“Oh well,” says he with a knowing smile, “it happens to all of us, you know.”
“Yes, so I understand,” I replied. “Still, thanks for asking.”
“Not at all,” says he, “not at all. Nice to see you …”
And another, my last ever, conversation with George Elas went like this:
“Oh, David! And how are you? Any better than last time I saw you?”
“Marginally, George. Thank you.”
“Oh, I know. I know. It takes a long, long time …”
“Thank you, George.”
“Just advice, mind you. A long, long time.”
“Thanks for the advice, George.”
“Aye, just friendly advice from experience. A long, long …”
“Thank you, George,” I interrupted. “I’m sorry to be rude but I find I can’t
take that advice after all and, coming from you, I don’t really need it.”
As a stage direction might have predicted: Exit stout party. Indeed, thus cued, I swep’ back
out into the night, wondering how I might have been thought to have acquitted myself.
Personally, I knew my performance had been nothing less than rubbish.
On the way back to Elm Place, rueing my absent car, I felt as though there was nowhere I
was meant to be, nowhere I wanted to be and had there been, I felt I had no way of getting there.
Worst, no longer had I any idea of who I was. If I have ever experienced limbo, it was that night.
Maybe it was that night which saw me finally plunge off that precipice which marks the divide
with ‘sane persons’ who I fancy live ‘up there’ and people like me, people wading through both
constant low-level depression and occasional off-the-scale bouts of tearful desperation, who live
‘down here’.
So, I turned tail and fled.
 PART II

Home Thoughts

I am the only man I know to come from here

My memories of home are undimmed and quite
clear
I used to think this place the land that
time forgot
But, then, a lot of what I thought was
mostly not.
The land that time forgot’s the land that
never was
And so I cannot go back home because …
because …
 INTRODUCTION

In 1981, I started writing another book. It was called SO, YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO
OPEN A RESTAURANT and it was one that I finished. That it didn’t see the light of day was
probably a mercy although in it, I traced the endeavour that I embarked upon in 1979 and which
lasted, from beginning to end, about three years. That the project was to find a setting in Malvern
was probably inevitable although in 1979, Malvern was the last place I wanted to be. But
Homewood had left its marks on me, not all of them scars; some were tattoos and one of these
read RESTAURATEUR, the blue word wrapped around a red knife and a candle. All the
cooking and cleaning and table-setting and washing up had ineffably branded a recurrent fantasy
on my mind’s loop. Bear with me for a moment as I reproduce what was the core of the book’s
first chapter and allow me the indulgence of a mitigating circumstance. If you don’t, you will be
unable to suspend your disbelief as to what you are about to read in this part of my story:
“ … I had always wanted to open a restaurant. Or, rather, I had always day-dreamed rather
idly about what it might be like to open a restaurant. Maybe, best, I had always craved to be in
the fortunate position to OWN a restaurant. Most of all, I had fancied the image of me, amiably
jaunting around the dining room, table-hopping to distraction, whilst ensuring the well-being of
my paying guests. I have never been one to remain content to merely day-dream. In fact I’ve
never let a sleeping dream lie in my life. And, after all, it seemed a reasonable and respectable
enough fantasy, eating and drinking and listening to un-intrusive mood music in comfortable and
attractive surroundings with my peers, similarly inclined, were the several aspects of my life that
I had truly enjoyed.
For a long time, the circumstances were never propitious, never exactly right to launch out
on such an undertaking. For example, I had first to work to amass sufficient capital to even
seriously contemplate the exercise. One’s personal circumstances must also be convenient to
enable all caution to be thrown to the winds without immediately having to chase round after
blown-away mothers-in-law, escaped children, runaway pets. Most seriously of all, one must
have reached that point of terminal insanity in which the shock and horror on the faces of those
nearest and dearest to you will not register on what is left of your brain when you joyfully break
the news of your impending folly. You will also need a hero, an inspiration, someone who, in
tandem with your own hare-brained ambition, would help to convince the doubters that you are
indeed capable of feeding the five thousand not only from fish and bread but with smoked
mackerel pate with whisky spread thickly on warm wholemeal toast.
Thus, with insufficient money to retire and merely ponce around other peoples’ restaurants
but enough in the bank to court my folly, I found myself in the summer of 1979, barmy enough to
finally take the plunge … Other than an ingenuous acquaintance with the business of food from a
customer’s point of view, I lay arrogant claim to a natural desire to want to cook for people. I
feel desperately that people should be fed and the more they can be fed, the better. I think
cooking is a way of loving. At least, turning the word around, watching the food you have cooked
being attacked voraciously by people who can’t cook is a sure-fire way of feeling loved. If these
few previous words add up to my qualification for wanting to approach the business of food from
the entrepreneurial end of the equation, then these few words must suffice for I have no others.
What certainly cannot be quantified in any number of words is ‘the feeling’; the
irrepressible urge to want to ‘do something’ with a melon, the last of a bottle of port, a packet of
green tagliatelle, a pot of cream, a forgotten bag of mushrooms and some suspicious streaky
bacon ‘cos suspicious streaky bacon is all the meat there is in the fridge. No meal I have cooked
purposefully with pecuniary intention has ever tasted as good as the meals that have just
‘happened’ … So, if the happening could be translated into the repeatable, maybe I could be in
business?
My bit of philosophy, very basic and perhaps a little banal is just that there seems no better
occasion of celebrating the fact that we are all human beings and not grazing or hunting
animals. Sitting down at a table and using proper knives and forks whilst enjoying the company
of either our families or our friends, sharing food, the one common denominator which ensures
our daily survival, is the final bastion of civilisation.
Talking to each other between mouthfuls is such a lovely way of communicating. To be
permitted the luxury of sitting for a few hours talking tirelessly with those you love after
polishing off a bowl of freshly gathered field raspberries or a fresh-picked Worcester apple
whilst nibbling on a scoop of smooth Stilton anticipating the arrival of freshly brewed coffee is
the ultimate celebration of the essence of humanity. Fresh. But it’s an essence which is being
diluted and evaporated from our repertoire in the face of pre-packed mega-store mania, fuelled
by the freezer fad and finally charred by laziness and lack of imagination. TV dinners, cook-chill
foods and any take-away other than fish ‘n’ chips are all anathema to me. Convenience food they
have been dubbed but the appellation conjures up only images of a vast public lavatory:
Convenience Foods – No Loitering.
To want to provide people with food they like in an atmosphere where they feel comfortable
and in a mind to spend, rather than save, time and all at a price that this hypothetical clientele
feels it can afford without weeping silently into their overdrafts behind a frozen smile were the
aims with which I set out. I wanted to provide three courses, including a glass of wine and coffee
for less than £5.00. I wanted to provide vegetables and/or a salad as well as an accompanying
‘filler’ (rice, pasta, bread or potatoes) inclusive in the price of the main course. I wanted to give
my customer a plateful about which there could be no complaint as to quality or quantity.
Well, if you could forgive the high-falutin’ tone and the incredibly smug and preachy
attitude, I really believed what I wrote. I still believed it AFTER the event and to an extent,
blanking out any thought of washing-up, I still believe it now, thirty years later. Sadly, my time
at Homewood may have qualified me to think up and effect recipes from the fewest and simplest
ingredients but it had in no way bequeathed me what a sensible course at catering college might
have done. A restaurant is oh-so-most-definitely NOT a merely expanded domestic kitchen.
But forget all the philosophy and the talk. In 1979, I still had to not only talk the talk; I had
to walk the walk. However, even getting to be able to practice the walk wasn’t exactly an
afternoon stroll on the Yellow Brick Road. So, fasten your seat belts and come with me, if you
will …
 Chapter Eighteen

“There’s not a lot of immorality west of Oxford …”

Why in 1978 I had written that in my diary I have quite forgotten but I suppose it was my
assumption that such a sweeping opinion was correct that kept drawing me back to London, even
though I knew in my heart of hearts that London was as bad for me as Bristol and Bath. I was
obviously still not quite ready to cut the chords of the capital’s siren song. I had just read
WATERSHIP DOWN and, silly sentimental thing that I am, I REALLY identified with Hazel,
that downland refugee, always running …
Another reason to repel me from, rather than draw me to, Malvern were those people who
only knew me as the ‘old’ me, the me who had been me before university and rock ‘n’ roll and
sex. Ena Bartlett, mother to my, still, dear friend and confidante Ann, had greeted me when she
saw me in the street one day and had heard of my possible return to the fold of the Land That
Time Forgot, sans employment, with: “Oh, hello dear, are you on the dole then?” To have to
even begin to explain the whys and wherefores to the town in general was daunting, to say the
least. Rather like an admission of failure, like an alcoholic standing up in front of a meeting and
making that famous pronouncement: “My name is so-and-so and I’m an …”. My three dots
would have been translated as “… an abject failure!”
1979 was also, of course, the year of Margaret Thatcher. She and her bemused Tories had
blazed to victory in the May general election. It seemed that much of what had been thought
sacred was at last possible; Mrs T had set her cap at several of the old shibboleths and sacred
cows. ‘Though she was to win with the trades unions, the restrictive and monopolistic practices
of the doctors and the lawyers would remain all-but unscathed and would leave her ultimately
defeated.
In London, only a mile down the Kings Road from where the Thatchers had recently moved
out of Flood Street, I was still drawn to Country Cousin. The cabaret which Christopher Hunter
and good luck had created in that space over the Furniture Cave in the Kings Road still drew
some amazing names. I saw Charles Pierce, the American drag impressionist about this time. Not
for a quarter of a century was there anyone like him until Earl Grey stumped up with FOREVER
SCARLETT. Pierce’s Mae West was more magnificent that the real thing: “See me up and come
sometime …” Later that Country Cousin season, in August, Frankie Howerd was to show us that
his comic genius was blighted not by any failing in itself but by a mere change of fashion. He
was mesmerisingly brilliant and yet, offstage and privately, so, so imprisoned in his own chains.
I suppose his own personal terrors added to the edge of his performance.
And if one walked the other way down the Kings Road, to Sloane Square, the Royal Court
was still staging sensational theatre. Martin Sherman’s BENT was so powerful I couldn’t sit
through it. I was so afraid, so discomforted and distressed, I left at the interval. I’ve never seen it
through since. As I have grown older, I find it more and more difficult to entertain any created
piece which portrays terror, fear, human degradation, disaster and atrocity. To know such things
have happened is sufficient – I don’t need to watch an enacted re-run.
 Bryan Forbes’ first assistant, Philip Shaw and his wife Veronica had opened their restaurant
in Bayswaters’s Ledbury Road and, thus, at least I had a couple of friends who could sympathise
with my current incipient madness. The actor Keith Barron and his wife Mary were also opening
up a restaurant and hotel in Cornwall. Was madness in the air?
There were others with whom I could share my hopes and dreams, including, I notice, David
Minns. However, long before he joined Warner Chappell, David, post-Freddie was not in a good
place in his life. The experience of the royal and upper echelons of the rock’n’roll life had
scarred him. He had turned away from me, as indeed he was to do once more before we finally
and inextricably linked our lives forever. But then, I could not persuade him to join me and after
an initial rebuffed suggestion, didn’t try again. In fact, he never came to Malvern to see me when
I relocated there. It was he, however, who told me that Ed had been in hospital and had
undergone some surgery. Of course I telephoned but the call only exhumed a dried-up umbilicus
of connection which had been long-ago and terminally severed. David persisted in maintaining
that one day it was his belief that Ed and I would ‘get back together again’ although I fancy that
view changed as soon as Ed turned on him too and no longer found association with David
agreeable.
Sarah’s Elm Place address was still a hive of meeting and greeting as Sarah’s London life
careered ever onwards. The most interesting people came and went through that front door,
particularly Guy Ford and Simon Turner, Sarah Radcliffe, Mark Phillips, Rory Faber and all
Cassian Elwes’ friends and his brothers’ school friends and associates. John Dodds became a
caller as did Martin Neil, the actor. The music that played was either Billy Joel, Jackson Browne
or Kim Carnes and the talk was pithy and witty and brittle and bright. And hollow. And alien.
And I felt a sort of phoney. Every day made it increasingly obvious that I was no longer really
part of ‘their’ world. For starters, I was too old for most of them. I realised that the gearing of the
generations was grinding deafeningly on one major cog’s teeth. I had been rendered, merely by
time, mechanically hors de service, toothless. There really was nothing for it but to attempt to
grab the rope with sore gums and let the surgeon cut the cord.
When I heard from my parents that a property had come available, I returned to Malvern at
once. When I got home, I found our dear old Labrador dog, Jason, to be at death’s door. We had
chosen him as a bounding puppy from a litter in West Malvern many years before and he had
been a faithful family pet ever since. He was now at the end of his road. I felt for him and with
him like no one would believe.
 Chapter Nineteen

“The only serious things in life are not to be a parasite and love thy neighbour.
I hope I’m not a parasite and we never do enough about loving thy neighbour …”
W.H. Auden as reported by Tom Davies circa 1979

I think the number of the house in Henley Place, Malvern was 16. Henley Place totalled
some seven or eight terraced properties. It could have been 18. It’s not important as each house
in that broken terrace that grandfather Bert had acquired was the same. Anyway, it came
available and I took the opportunity as soon as it appeared. It seemed for a few moments that
there was, after all, somewhere I was supposed to be, only a street and a few yards away from
where Edward Elgar had settled for a time in a house called Forli. My grandad used to fix the
roof there. Maybe this location could work for me too, after all?
It was a cottage, two down, three up, one of the ‘ups’ having been converted into a
bathroom. The kitchen at the back was decrepit and collapsing. The garden was shared with all
three other cottages in the terrace and the view was up to the quarried slopes of the North Hill,
the quarrying for granite having long since been stopped. The whole property would have to be
‘done up’. So what? I was up for it, having nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. Perhaps
doing up a house would do me up too?
Thus, the place appeared, as they say now, fit for purpose, that purpose being to house a man
of huge past and no future. Having made my decision to move in, I ploughed into the project
with what I was fast understanding was a determination somewhat akin to that false sense of
urgent purpose that I have always associated with the alcoholics or drug addicts stomping the
pavements of places like Kings Cross in London - walking quickly, seemingly purposeful, going
nowhere except to stand still, to arrive somewhere only to leave immediately. Like them, I
infused my going nowhere with a blinkered but palliative sense of intent.
My immediate neighbour was J. Evans and Sons Ltd’s long-term electrician, Sid Doran.
Lovely man but impossible to fathom more deeply than the superficial as he was as deaf as any
heavy-metal roadie. Hearing aid? You must be kidding! However, he was, as expertly as his
rudimentary skills embraced, to re-wire my new cottage palace after the dust and the demolition
and the labouring heave-ho had been done although the new wiring ran un-ducted like exposed
veins over, but never - heaven for ’fend - beneath, the surfaces of the rooms. That a floorboard
might be raised when a trusty trail of ugly plastic cable tacks could be hammered into a skirting
board hadn’t even made the trade papers, let alone been put on the menu. The surface finish was
a million miles away from that which a smart interior decorator might expect. But then, life was
always cheaper in the provinces where domestic fashions were only beginning to be considered
‘life-style’ essentials.
Next door to Sid, at number 14, lived Madame Husson-Saget, my grandfather Bert’s
housekeeper together with his old corgi dog, Paddy, who had survived him. Her name was
Suzanne, but it would have been somehow unbecoming, indecorous even, to address her as
anything other than ‘Madame’. Even in impossibly proud neo-destitution, Madame was never
anything but a very gracious, insouciant and expatriate grande bourgeoise. After Bert’s death in
1971, Suzanne, aged about seventy, had been given her cottage by our family for life at a
peppercorn rent. I think she paid, then, a pound a week and only at her insistence. By the time
severe old age had forced her to move to Hastings, a care facility in Barnards Green, I think she
paid two. The simplicity of her life always inspired me and when I felt really sorry for myself, I
only had to take an evening sherry with her to restore a sense of perspective. The way she
maintained her dignity, poise and authority could have been a lesson to many. Being a Catholic,
she now lies close to Edward Elgar’s remains in the St Wulstan’s churchyard at Little Malvern
where she loved to walk with what became a succession of beloved Paddies.
The identity of another neighbour will emerge later.
Audrey Cook - who ran the business and organisation of J. Evans and Son, the family
business - was also a neighbour, in those days occupying a flat which had been specially made
for her ‘over the shop’, as it were, at 99 and 101 Newtown Road, two of those granite-faced
houses built by bricklayer-turned-entrepreneur John Evans and distributed to his ten children on
his death. As best as she could, Audrey always helped me in the process of re-furbishing of my
cottage, dropping encouraging supportive hints to my father. She was always helpful, especially
in my later endeavour although no labouring help was ever forthcoming from the company’s
employee roster; it was my father and I who always did most of the basic work.
Plumbers such as newly married and father-to-be Wesley Curtis were brought in as and
when but father was never profligate in providing work which he had to pay for and most of the
tearing down and clearing up in Henley Place was done by father and I. As he rarely instituted
any work to update the portfolio of properties which constituted the A.F. Evans Trust, I don’t
think it occurred to him that the work on number 18 Henley Place would both increase the value
of the place and upgrade the level of rent that could be charged in future. That widening of
perspective was not to be provided until my sister returned to Malvern, years later. Thus, even
being forced by circumstance to apply his hand to at least a part of his responsibility, my father’s
input stopped short of installing central heating for me and a really nice kitchen. But, prodigals
(me) don’t have much say … If the fatted calf arrives a little thin, tant pis as the French say.
Tough old aunt Piss.
My mother, always bored, discontented and restless and ready for any new project until she
encountered the first hurdle, was ostensibly more enthusiastic about my return to Malvern than
my father. There would be curtains to make, carpets to choose … In fact, I later learned, from the
suspiciously louche Michael Trigg who had been at school with me and whose parents ran the
‘chippie’ in Albert Park Road, that my father was deeply unhappy about his prodigal’s return.
Far from fetching out any fatted calf, he had, apparently, made his uneasy feelings known ‘in the
town’.
Why do I believe this? Later, much later in life and after my father’s death, I heard from his
magistrate colleague Joan Pugh that, concerning my brother, he had put it about that he would
never trust my brother and felt that ‘poor Richard’ was a constant liability. No wonder my
brother never made any headway in the town and, thus, was constantly under my parents’
financial thrall. No wonder my father’s friends and contacts did not come a-flocking to my own
needy door when I later … Ah, but I hasten indecently.
It seemed odd then - and seems even odder now - that it had hardly been ten years since I
had left Malvern - where I had had a myriad friends and acquaintances - for university in
Canterbury where, to begin with, I had none. I had blithely forgotten most of my Malvern friends
only to make many friends at University although then, it appeared, I had lost them too, just as
quickly as my little powder-blue Triumph Herald had whisked me up the brand-new motorway
to London.
Now, ten years later, marooned ‘back home’, there was no one immediately I wanted to see.
Those of the old ‘gang’ whom I might have wanted to see had, like me, left Malvern. Amongst
those who had remained, there was no one I actively wanted to play with and those I might have
asked to the playground wouldn’t have known my games. It would have been like playing whist
with continental cards. Cups and swords and all that. My anti-social mindset was just as well as
no one I had known came to see me anyway.
In the absence of any society, I also needed to work. No, I felt I should work. My brother,
through his illness, did enough ‘not working’ for all of us. Thus, thanks to J. Evans and Son’s
maintenance contract with Malvern Girls’ College, I worked as a junior painter in those
buildings as soon as the school holidays began when extra labour was required. I enjoyed the run
of the main building on Avenue Road, annexed to the Great Malvern Station platform by a series
of graded, canopied walkways. The place had been designed in the mid-nineteenth century by
one of the Great Western Railway architects and built as the end-of-the-line hotel for the railway
which, before the cutting of the Malvern Hills tunnel, had to stop at Great Malvern for the
passengers to disembark and cross over the hills by pony and cart to re-board the train waiting on
the Hereford side. Not as exuberant as some of the fanciful railway buildings such as the
gorgeous St. Pancras station in London, the place was still a monument to that Victorian ‘castle’
mentality which I feel owed a lot to the Germanic roots of Prince Albert. My knowledge of
continental furniture gained at the knee of Master Murray, allowed me to identify many of the
original pieces with which the hotel had been furnished and which were still being used in the
rooms and made me wonder why so much continental had been imported to complete the
‘contract’.
I never felt the presence of absent twentieth century teenage schoolgirls in those empty
corridors but many a time I fancied I saw a disappearing wraith, a ghost of a long-forgotten
traveller, hurrying to catch the London train. And the London trains still called at my station. I
heard them and saw them every painful day as I yearned for London. I knew I’d played my cards
wrong; well, THEN I thought I’d played my cards wrong. As it turned out, the way I’d played
what I’d been dealt probably saved my life because it had taken me away from London. And that
constant nagging temptation in one’s loins …
I rarely took a London train because, even though still without a car, at least I had recourse
to asking for the occasional ‘loan’ of either my mother’s or my father’s, usually the former. As I
was still welcome at Elm Place in London, I spent many weekends there seeing my ‘London’
friends. On one such trip it was to go to a special party at Bryan and Nanette Forbes. I think it
was one of Bryan’s al fresco summer birthday bashes in his wonderful garden and I had been
forewarned. No, too strong … I had been advised that Princess Margaret was to be there. I
scraped and sanded and applied myself to the paintwork in the various classrooms of the Girls
College both before and after that weekend thinking how ironic it was that although down on my
knees in the dust one moment, the next I was helping Her Royal Highness clear the plates after
lunch. And that was exactly what happened. The hands-on side of the Queen’s sister that was
rarely seen.
 At the time P.M was being squired by Roddy Llewellyn who wasn’t the sweet, amusing
fellow I am told he grew up to be. His talents had not yet been husbanded. He was no gardener
then. Merely a rather silly boy caught, rabbit-like in the headlights of temporary celebrity. He
was a pain in the ass but for a time he made Princess Margaret happy. I imagine and dearly hope
that he is lately much changed. Then, Roddy also knew how to make himself scarce and later
that afternoon I watched as Princess Margaret and the actress Annette Crosbie, who had just
played a television version of PM’s great-great-grandmamma Victoria, took a long turn around
the rhododendron bushes. Oh, to have been a butterfly on a close-by blossom …
I was to meet Princess Margaret several times subsequently, usually at the Crush Bar of the
Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. So many lonely women seemed to end up there, escorted
perhaps, but being escorted nowhere. The celebrated Royal Court actress Jill Bennett, once wife
to John Osborne, was another such lady. Fabulously talented and kind and funny, just as PM
could be and both certainly undeserving of the fate their lives had concocted for them.
My mother, needless to say, was very impressed with the Princess Margaret story. I could
tell because she completely ignored it. I knew that even she, one of the town’s greater gossips,
would have had trouble purveying that one through Malvern’s conversational alleys. “My son
was at a party with Princess Margaret last weekend …” The line didn’t play, coming from my
mother. She didn’t have the substance to back it up and would have ended up feeling
embarrassed. Shame. All she’d needed was a bit of pride in her wandering Bohemian prodigal.
But she only ‘did’ pride when its subject was something she understood – like my sister
Elizabeth’s tennis or brother Richard’s football or her grandchildren, Stephen and Michael for
just being her grandchildren. I was always rather jealous that the grand-kids, for the time of their
childhood, didn’t have to be or do anything wonderful but merely exist to be adored. However,
when Michael the youngest in late and lustful teenage had left what was laughingly called
‘school’ and had become mildly wayward and uncontrollable, he too, behind his back, became
the subject of the lash of her tongue and the cluck of her ‘tut’ and that deep sigh and the
inclination of the head which always indicated terminal censure. But he had produced the only
heir the Evans bloodline had thrown up and so for that, he was at least defended if not supported
and the snow-white-adorable mantle fell upon the shoulders of his daughter Lauren.
Although David, me, was always ‘the clever one’, when later I began to have books
published, they were never displayed with any prominence in my mother’s home and nor were
they advertised in her circles in the town. She was never to have any confidence in the son she
had produced. She never understood him. Nor tried. Like poor Princess Margaret, having been
‘persuaded’ to do her duty, the sacrifice was never acknowledged, the woman ignored, the
resulting waywardness censured. Now I come to think of it, books of any description were never
even on mother’s agendum. When I let slip that I was writing a first memoir, she remarked
through very pursed lips: “Well, that will be for purely private reading, won’t it?”
But though I felt that family matters were awry at the time, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t
understand her. Mother Mary. Or him, father Pat. That they were there for me when I was so
marooned, I know I should be grateful. But, you know, the marooning was only temporary and I
now think they didn’t even begin to do enough. They were, in turn, to fail all their children. Not
a nice thing to say about people who can’t answer back but … sorry. That’s how I feel.
How strange it is that sometimes, such wonderfully happy events turn out to have other sides
which make them almost regrettable. As soon as I had begun working on the cottage, a brown
A4 envelope dropped through the door. It contained a copy of GAY TIMES. I assumed for a
moment that it was a freebie, an introductory offer which some kind London friend had contrived
to be sent to me. But no, there was a cheque attached, for twenty-five pounds and a letter, a very
nice letter from that miracle of modern gay culture - also the editor of the publication - Dennis
Lemon. I had all but forgotten that I had sent him a story. He had accepted it and printed it.
What a moment of triumph flushed and suffused my dusty little world of paint-scraping and
sand-paper. My first published, paid-for story! I turned the cheque and the letter this way and
that for several minutes, re-reading it before opening the magazine and seeing my story,
beautifully illustrated by Tony Reaves. Whether it was indeed Dennis who chose my story or
some more fanciful a fellow cast in my own sentimental mould, I know not. But, to whoever it
was, I offer my deepest gratitude. How strange it is that so often the hand that really helps you up
the trickiest part of the ladder appears anonymous and thus un-thankable.
I so wanted to tell someone about my story. I so wanted to tell someone that I was a ‘proper’
writer and that, for once, one of my ventures had borne fruit. I wanted to tell everyone but, ring-
fenced by circumstance, my triumph went un-applauded. I had no telephone, could only use my
parents’ phone and couldn’t use it because I couldn’t tell my parents. Could I? Their son. A story
in a GAY newspaper? Horrors!
So, I enjoyed my moment of joy, at that point my greatest achievement, alone. It was a few
days before I could tell anyone at all. Not the nicest few days. So I’m going to re-live my
moment and re-print my story here.

A LEGACY

by

David Evans

It was not a large bequest but I was both grateful and surprised; a few
thousand pounds which I never thought he had. I had never thought of him as being
either rich or poor. There was no family that he ever spoke of. He appeared to be
quite alone, so his neighbours would tell me. Although the little house was
rented, one of a terrace of cottages, he cared for it as though it was his own.
The garden surrounding the house was like his mind, highly fertile and always
interesting.
I remember it always full of flowers; even in winter, the mahonia, the
flowering laurels and on the south wall the jasmine smelled as sweetly as the
massed lilacs and heavy orange blossom scented the summer evenings when we sat
and drank large glasses of sherry or cold white wine on the seat on the brick-
paved yard outside the back porch, watching the sun set and talking of favourite
books and writers, trading well-loved and oft-repeated lines of favoured authors
to illustrate the observations of our combined years. The last time I had gone
down to visit him he joked that, although taken together, our lives spanned two
centuries, they would never make it to three. It was the first time I had heard
him to refer to death, however, obliquely and the first time that he had voiced a
certain regret. The thought crossed my mind as I left him that it would be the
last time I would see him. I quickly put it out of my mind. It seemed that I had
known him for ever and, after all, for ever is forever.
I folded the curtly phrased letter from his solicitor and replaced it in its
envelope, tucking it into my pocket. The train pulled into the station and,
following a local wife laden with metropolitan shopping, I hurried through the
ticket barrier.
It was a cold, clear March morning and the bite of the country air was keen,
sharpening the vagueness of my feelings on returning for the last time to the
little town where I had grown up. My family had long since moved away and despite
an unhappily remembered childhood, I felt strangely comfortable as I walked up
the main street to the solicitor’s office. The letter had taken some time to
reach me and as I had twice changed addresses in the last months, I had missed
his funeral. On receipt of the letter, I had telephoned the solicitor who had
offered to send me the cheque but I wanted to be near him once more, to sit for a
while as he lay beside me.
I collected the cheque and the unopened envelope addressed to ‘My Dearest
Hope’ – no address. I smiled and could not suppress a laugh. The solicitor looked
at me reproachfully and cleared his throat but the sound of an old man’s chuckle
laughed with me. He had taken to calling me his ‘dearest hope’ some years before
when I observed that, at age thirty, I could no longer be considered his ‘dearest
boy’, even though he must have been twice my age. Boy changed to hope and we
became two men.
I had thought on the train of going down to the house to recall some of the
times we had spent together, me looking forward and him looking back, each
learning from the other as we both lived on. On reflection, there seemed little
point. I thanked the unnecessarily reverent solicitor and walked a little further
up the High Street to the flower shop. I chose four bowls of daffodils. The
flowers were just beginning to show yellow through the green buds. At
Woolworth’s, I bought a trowel. I recognised the young woman on the till as
someone with whom I had been at school. I shall never know if she recognised me
as we did not speak.
I decided to take a taxi out to the churchyard with my bulbs. The sun shone
brilliantly in the cloudless sky. I asked the taxi driver to wait for me as he
pulled up in front of the lych gate. The man looked at me suspiciously.
“I’ll pay now if you’d prefer?” I said defensively. He grunted, hesitated and
then shook his head.
“No. ‘S ok. You jus’ never knows though … With some folk …”
Only the chugging of the taxi’s idling engine disturbed the tranquil history
of the churchyard. I knew exactly where to go, how to find him. We had often
walked through the churchyard in the summer, watching the gravedigger, retired
from the Post Office, scything the long grass between the stones in the lee of
the church. Although we had often walked there, neither of us had ever alluded to
the reality of the reaper. It was mere romance. Next to the plot there was a
seat, underneath the plane trees. I sat down once more, remembering our evergreen
conversations about ‘the meaning of it all’. I had once seriously thought of
joining the Rosicrucians, a thought which I had first voiced on that seat, a
thought which he had listened with equal seriousness, offering no opinion until I
asked for one.
“My dearest hope,” he said, his blue eyes watering behind his half-glasses,
“we are what we are without having to look in a mirror. I don’t think we need
reflections of our beliefs to confirm what we believe. But you must do as you
wish.”
I was pleased that there were no wilted wreaths over him, no insulting
sympathies written by a florist who didn’t really care, paid for by a forgotten
relative who hadn’t come but who had sent flowers ‘just in case’. Neither had any
grass grown. The winter had been particularly harsh and I hope that he hadn’t
been cold. There was a stone. He must have asked for it himself. It was very
plain, very simple, of polished grey marble and it carried an inscription still
fresh from the stonemason’s chisel.

ASHLEY HOBSON, DIED 1978

 LOVING FRIEND OF MICHAEL
WHO DIED BEFORE.

I was not surprised and certainly didn’t mind crying. I felt happy at the
resolution of the mystery we both acknowledged, shared, yet never discussed. “The
only mystery is that there is no mystery,” he often said. People had only
referred dismissively to the old man who passed them daily on his way to the
shops and I only once before heard reference made to ‘the other gentleman’.
Ashley had never told me himself.
I planted the bulbs in the frost-softened earth and threw the bowl in the
little bin. There was no reason to stay. I remembered the envelope and opened it.
His handwriting was obviously weak, written just before the end. His words were
optimistic and seemed content. There were a few lines about goodbyes and his wish
that I should use whatever money there was left over after the funeral exactly as
I pleased. On the second page he had written a poem; at least, some lines. He
said he hoped it would make me laugh.

A RECIPE

In the evening, fill a large glass with good wine or sherry.

Drink and repeat.
With eyes closed,
Mix random proportions of the following

ingredients:

Some good times (easily preserved)

A little nostalgia (found in most gardens)
Some sadness (pungent but good seasoning)
A dash of honesty (difficult to distil accurately)
Equal amounts of tears and smiles (adds bulk if lacking in flavour)
A good book (hard or soft cover)
Some sentiment (very sweet and easily overused)
An admission or two (often sharp and matures unpredictably)
A glimmer of truth (best stored at night)
A song (the popular varieties are cheaper and just as potent)
A passport (an infallible tonic, too infrequently used)
Light and shade (best gathered in the early evening)
Some love letters (more fragrant when dried)
Fading photographs (deliciously piquant when stored over a long period)
Two hearts (broken or unbroken)
A handful of regrets (dilute with distance if too bitter)
Flowers (never too many)
A great deal of love (most important ingredient but hard to obtain)

Drain the glass

Open the eyes
The taste is heavenly.
If not, repeat as many times as necessary,
From the beginning.
 Chapter Twenty

“We’re the ones, glitter and dazzle,

Stars without wonder, adrift in the blue;
Call up the people, vacant yet puzzled,
Give them a rainbow, a spring-flower dew,
A pierrot …”
PHILIP HEATH 1980

Of course, after painting Malvern Girls College during the day, in the evenings, after a
cuppa and a slice of cake with the parents at teatime, I would walk down to the cottage through
Trinity Churchyard and Newtown Road and paint some more. For myself. Truth is that I was
glad to be on my own. It was summer. As I worked, I played the tapes of my previous
employers, principals and acquaintances; I languished in the music of which I had been such a
part and lost myself in the flatness and surface of the paint as I attempted to paint away the
painful past as much as I was painting away the painful present. I painted and painted and if I
could have painted myself out, I would have done. Instead, I painted myself further into any and
every available corner. Funny, how much ‘pain’ there is in ‘paint’ and ‘painting’.
Except, one evening, I looked down and in the street outside there stood a tallish blond-
haired man of very good looks holding the hand of a tow-headed little girl and looking up at the
house. That cheered me up. Previously, the view from what was to be my bedroom window was
taken up only by the window frame of the house opposite, a bedroom window frame too, a
bedroom occupied by a comely youth called Alan who used to spend hours fixing motor bikes
and old cars in the street outside and would respond with hardly more than a grunt when greeted.
And, later, alone in his bedroom, was he yet so isolated and inured and immune to the picture he
presented, framed so … ? And with my light turned out, his was often turned on in those long
hours between dusk and dreamtime.
 Breaking Free by Philip Heath

But back to the big blond … Did I wait a decent minute or two before finding myself
downstairs and opening the front door? Did I fuck. I think two seconds did the trick.
And then, of course, the realisation, the disappointment and the swift transition from a
perspective of lust to one of utter relief that I could possibly have found a friend with whom I
could build a relationship, mutually beneficial and tide-stemming. Well, for a while I almost did.
I could have done it for longer, but then my new acquaintance wasn’t a straight man. He wasn’t
Michael Hannah, that’s for sure, my totally straight yet totally soul mate. New friend lived at the
end of the row of cottages, a house called I believe, Abergele Cottage. He was married,
employed at Malvern Boys College as the Art Master, came from the Potteries and lived with his
wife Christine and their two young daughters, Sasha and Tara. His name? Oh, sorry – quite
forgot. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Philip Heath.
To call him the Art Master, second-in-charge of the newly built and fantastically well-
equipped Art Building is to do him an injustice. Even then, unsung, he was obviously one of the
world’s master potters. Had he worn a dress occasionally, he would have out-Grayson Perry-ed
Grayson Perry and pipped the latter to the prettiest-potter post by a generation. That Phil was gay
was obvious, at least to me and my ‘gaydar’ can be pretty skewed at times. He knew he was gay,
too although ‘the others’ didn’t. They really didn’t. Phil’s gayness was unlike mine in my
teenage Malvern. As I later discovered, I really needn’t have bothered hiding mine.
But because I knew about Phil, from that first meeting I fell into the old routine and knew
that I had to side-step the implications, those being that he would have really fancied a shag and
had I not been cursed with conscience, I’d’ve leapt at him too. I don’t do shagging with those I
know to be married, know to be fathers and responsible, in loco parentis, for several hundred
pubescent boys and ESPECIALLY those who live in the same road! I find all those necessary
secrets which ensue from such a shag unbearable and unfair, unfair to everyone. Philip, being
one of that eighty percent, one of those married gay men the world is full of, would have been
quite happy to have a secret. He’d probably had many and was to prove to be able to harbour
several more before the cathartic and inevitable ‘coming out’. However, the thought of seeing the
grief and pain of a wife-woman spurned, scorned and side-lined is too much for me and I backed
off the shag stakes immediately.
For a while, neither tripped the delicate balance and ‘it’ worked and we became friends. I
like to think that I helped him make the quantum leap, the one that spanned the gap between
Abergele Cottage and ‘out there’. The Land That Time Forgot might have suited Mr Elgar but it
wouldn’t do for the Phil that Phil needed to become. So, maybe I was indeed the cause of the
grief and the pain and the tears that were to follow our meeting as surely as rain follows sun. I
have seen Christine Heath once, since those days. I hope she has forgiven me, if indeed there was
anything to forgive. If it hadn’t been me cast in the role of the enabler, it would have been
someone else and rather the world knew and recognised Phil’s talent and ambition than he
languish unfulfilled and unhappy and frustrated, warming his disappointment against the feeble
fire of the ‘A level’ efforts of generations of Malvern College boys and girls whose work he
might see emerge from his kiln.
But through and because of that meeting that night, when we sat and drank wine in my
unfinished cottage after he had taken his daughter back home to be put to bed by Christine, I met
a generation of young men and women from the sixth forms of the Malvern public schools who
individually and together made up my life over the next two years. Other than my needlepoint,
they were my occupation and solace. I thought they were special. But then I think everyone who
stands up, stands out and tries to stay standing when ‘they’ open fire is special and Phil, blazing
with artistic talent and sexual frustration, was prime in that regard. I remember Phil said to me
after that first evening’s conversation: “You really think you’re something special, don’t you?”
Yes, Phil. I did think I was something special and yes, Phil, wherever you are now, I still do. As
were and are you. Something else.
In June 1979, he had just begun work on the series of pots which would afford him his first
exhibition. Pots with Pierrots, those embodiments of human souls who lived and died beneath the
moon. I know, it sounds odd but the juxtaposition of the beautifully worked, glazed and fired
pieces which acted as the platforms and rostra for the pierrot dolls to sit on were exquisite and
emotional. The dolls with immaculately glazed and gilded physiognomies were creations of
another race, superficially human but entirely alien, as though he had created them from pain,
curiosity, innocence, bewilderment and regret. Moreover, they were dressed beautifully in a
clown couture invented and designed and sewn by Christine, a job which was later developed by
their equally talented daughter Tara, the little tow-headed girl from that first evening meeting. I
was entirely impressed and deeply touched when one of the Heath pots arrived as a present …
But, too fast, Dais. Slow down.
It was thanks to Phil and Christine Heath and his and his students’ work that my fascination
with needlepoint redoubled. Oh, had I not mentioned that one day in 1978, Sarah Forbes and her
mother Nanette Newman had introduced me to the craft of needlepoint? ‘Your embroidery’, as
my father so put it. Down. Phil and his wife and coterie were very enthusiastic about my early
endeavours and didn’t see it as anything unusual at all and I bless the day I came to the craft.
Secretly, I always looked upon it as an art but I didn’t dare say then and I almost daren’t say now
…
My love of ‘it’ began just after I had left Ed and my misery was trailing behind me like an
unravelling thread. Nanette, always sensitive to the plights of others, noticed. “You’ve got too
much time to think. You need something. Try this …” And thus she and Sarah showed me the
first stitch and thereafter, I flew. They have been told and they have been acknowledged but they
will never, never know just what a tremendous gift they had given me for I had at last found
something into which I could direct all my heart’s effort and, whether the results were good or
bad in the eyes of others, the results to me were of the MOST satisfying sort. Truly fulfilling.
I never stitched anyone else’s design – ‘cept the once - and from the first little square of
canvas scrim, upon which I executed my first original design, I haven’t looked back in thirty
years. It and I have remained as loyal as any monogamy. It doesn’t let me down and I hope I
have contributed a few extra layers to it. I can honestly admit that needlepoint saved me
although, contrary to Nanette’s assessment, it gives me a HUGE amount of time to think! In the
grip of the bite of the Black Dog, I have learned that it’s the first bit of baggage to put down.
Attending to it, especially to repetitive background work, allows those destructive conversations
with myself to multiply and amplify, those endless tendrils of questions and chimerical
conclusions to tighten their tourniquet grip around the flow of my soul.
For those who are interested, for my sixtieth birthday in 2007, I mounted an exhibition of all
my work and made a book to accompany and explain the event. It’s called STITCHES IN TIME
and is available via Gardners Books at any decent bookshop. It’s horribly expensive at almost
thirty pounds but the colour illustrations sort of make it worth the money. It’s also now an e:book
costing far less.
And speaking of money, back in 1979, my careless past had unravelled yet again and the
spectre of David Evans Artists Management Ltd rose once again even though it no longer
boasted any artistes. Debts and taxes. It was the ‘limited’ part of the endeavour’s title which
caused the stumbling block. Why I was ever advised to incorporate my former efforts I have
forgotten, but in cynical hindsight, it was probably because someone would make money from
preparing the legally required annual accounts, accounts which, because I had never formally
terminated the company’s activities, I had therefore omitted to file.
I paid a large amount to my former London accountants to get me off the hook, thus
depleting my dwindling capital funds even more. I learned only too painfully the difference
between a limited liability company and a sole partnership, the advantages and disadvantages of
both. Ouch. Debts to H.M. Revenue popped up with alarming regularity over the next two years.
I paid each one with bitter tears.
Armed with the knowledge that he was to have an exhibition at a local gallery in Ombersley,
I drove Phil Heath up to London one day for an interview with the owner of the Casson Gallery
in Marylebone High Street. Phil got his London exhibition and all that was left for him to do was
to create sufficient number of extra pieces to fill a room from which the gallery could profit. It
was my first real foray into the world of art galleries and exhibitions. The world of fifty percent.
I was to make that round of the London galleries a couple of times more before Phil’s and my
paths parted forever.
In fact the artists often found themselves on the wrong side of fifty percent. Wow. When I
think of the anguish of exacting work that Phil put himself through to achieve his perfect pots,
the breakdown and mis-firings of the kiln and subsequent re-makings and re-firings, what was
eventually displayed at Mrs Casson’s gallery was nothing short of miraculous.
But even with my newly forged Malvern friends and the re-forging of what had,
metaphorically, broken in my own kiln, I felt wretched. It was by now September. However
many pounds of blackberries I picked, I could see no further than the next briar.
“I look out and up at the brooding hills and think back to when I was young
and the sky above the highest of them was the limit. Trouble is, in this realm
where I was once one of the kings, amongst my comparable peers, I did make it at
least to the sky. But where to now? The sky is no longer tempting; I know what
it’s like. Now I need to go beyond the sky. But even if there is anything beyond
the sky, how do you get there? … As far as the cottage is concerned, the place is
finished. It’s just a fucking cell, a place of imprisonment where my soul takes
not flight but hides from light.”
I approached the organiser of the Malvern Festival, still struggling on since its renaissance
ten years previously under the aegis of Bill Boht. Nothing doing. That I had almost single-
handedly revived The Playhouse in Edinburgh and instigated the founding season of concerts
there was received as nought. It probably was received as nought because I sold it as nought and
whoever it was that granted me ‘a meeting’ would likely have been terrified of my swagger and
bluster and enforced name-dropping, always worsened by nervousness. I HATE selling myself.
Bryan and Nanette, Emma and her friend Kim came down for lunch one day and the sun
shone even though Mountbatten of Burma was buried that day after being assassinated by the
IRA. Many years later, I recall a guide in Singapore pointing out Government House as we were
passing and saying: “On that balcony, accepting the Japanese surrender stood Lord Louise
Mountbatten …” Oops, I thought, poor Louise. Sorry, Louis. But it was to be a few years before
his can of worms was finally opened wide.
About the same time, I acquired a cat. I called her Masha, after one of those relentlessly
depressing three sisters so accurately brought to the world by Mister Chekhov. But feline Masha
was an un-compliant creature, would not become – or saw no point – in being house-trained and,
eventually, she abandoned such a hopelessly needy case as I and went to live elsewhere with
people who made no demands. Cats hate to be depended on.
A few days later, when I’d cleared up the last little drying turd hidden by the incontinent cat
and the cottage was habitable, Felicity Dean came to stay. She was filming in Tewkesbury and it
was a delightful diversion to wake up early with a purpose, however slight, even if that purpose
was merely to chauffeur her to work. And I collected her again afterwards. Filled the day. Clive
and Moira Banks took a cottage for a time at How Capel on the other side of the hills in
Herefordshire and I visited. The visit only reminded me of how free I was and that should I ever
have regrets, I should remind myself that I am neither Clive nor Moira.
Sara Randall kept up with me and used to ask me to do little jobs for her, driving her to
places where she had to see clients. After going to one of Sian Phillips’ and Robin Sachs’ parties
at their hugely tall house in Oakley Road, Islington, Sara asked if I would be free to take her to
Cornwall where Pat Phoenix had sought sanctuary and solace in the Admiral Benbow hotel in
Mousehole after the death of her friend Alan Browning.
What a wonderful freedom to drive through London early in the morning when the dawn’s
as sleepy as the early morning commuters and all the lights are green. We visited the Minack
Theatre at Porthcurno, creation of a Miss Rowena Cade where Sara has often, during the
summer, brought productions from the Tower Theatre in Canonbury. It stands on the edge of the
world, decorated with carved reliefs, as much Art Deco as Celtic, reflecting the wind-worn shape
of the granite rocks, like a Greek temple on the shores of one of the promontories of the
Peleponnese.
“… It was a scary sorority with whom we had dinner at the Berkeley
Restaurant. We, rather Sara, were there because there were also two reporters
from The Weekly News who paid for the event. What they made of it, I never read
but present were Pat herself, Kitty Smith – Pat’s housekeeper, Ivy – Pat’s
cousin, a widow in her early sixties and Carol, a big woman whose husband had
died only eleven months ago. With the latter, I talked about loneliness and now
realise that it is a human condition – more people than I ever imagined suffer
from really acute loneliness. Only a moment in a day, perhaps, but nevertheless
even the shortest attack of loneliness is like the thrust of a barbed dagger; the
knife remains in the flesh, to remove it causing more hurt than help. Pat went
home about eleven-thirty and so, so did we all. Tired beyond belief.
Kitty Smith is a wonderful character – her face is like an apple which has
been kept in an old trunk under the bed over the winter. She is wizened and
starting to bend over, like the later Piaf. Ivy is laconic, dry, cynical as well
as being lonely. Around Pat, these women form a buffer, a shield of basic
womanhood, somehow poised like a Panzer division to repel the onslaught of the
masculine world.”
The following day we met for lunch at the Tin Mine Tavern at Trewellard, just outside St
Just. It hadn’t been two years since Pat and I had talked before, at dinner at Homewood.
 “… Pat and I do have the same view and philosophy of life which we mutually
expounded for hours. Ivy, I think, was bored and greatly mistrustful of me.
Anyway … Pat is a signed up Rosicrucian … What a co-incidence … Pat is a
wonderful institution and long may she reign. I feel that she has created Elsie
Tanner as the character that she (Pat) would like to be. As it is she is a woman
of fifty-five who has just had her face lifted for the second time, goes to bed
alone with a book instead of a man, regrets her ordinariness and yearns for
intellect, nobility and the perfection of her ‘immortal soul’ with which she is
greatly preoccupied. She has an extraordinary grasp of the metaphysical which is
offset by the earthy, terrier-like quality of the mother/woman. As an actress she
is unique for she is entirely a product of television; she is, therefore, a
conglomerate mirror image of all the women (and men too) who watch her on the
screen, love her, live her and exist as reflections of her glory as she exists as
a reflection of theirs. She is looking for a play … God bless her.”
I drove Sara back to London and then returned to Malvern where the swallows were about to
leave and the last of the blackberries still waited to be picked. I got a letter from Ed asking for all
his books back. I never realised he was such a bibliophile but I complied immediately. I have
forgotten what the books were, probably scholarly tomes on the pedigree and identification of
English printed transfer ware. Willow Pattern to thee and me.
I have a final memory of Pat Phoenix which I must record, otherwise it will remain lost in
time. Some few years later, Madame was appearing with her husband Tony Booth in a creaky
old Agatha Christie at The Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne, outside which town I had
partly settled. A group of us, London queens down for the weekend, formed a pilgrimage and
attended a performance, after which we trooped round to the stage door where I requested an
audience.
Down she came, all teeth and fag-ash, un-removed make-up and a smile that could have
illuminated the entire Eastbourne promenade. She generously gave us a glorious five minutes
which began and ended with much abandoned huggin’ and kissin’. Sadly, she was booked for
dinner, otherwise, she assured us, she’d’ve loved to share our fish’n’chips. In the car on the way
home, I noticed that, to one friend’s shoulder, one of Pat’s long chestnut hairs had attached itself.
With great ceremony and not a little gayboy-giggling, the hair was removed and saved and when
we got back to the house, a large sheet of paper was produced to which the single strand of hair
was sello-taped and some duly respectful, nay worshipful lines of devotional adoration written
beneath, thus creating a sort of reliquary shrine.
What a conversation piece it was and thus we maintained our shrine for years until one day
it was discarded, the paper stained with spiders’ domestic doings and warped and yellowed by
too much direct sunlight in our holiday home.
A few weeks later, Pat was dead and we were all the poorer. How many of Pat’s fans could
have boasted possession of such an intimate article of memorabilia? She will never be forgotten,
not, at least, in our house.
 Chapter Twenty-One

“In our imaginations, the adults of our

childhood remain essential, extreme – we
might say radical since they are the roots
that feed luxuriant later systems. Those
first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic
in memory even though were we to meet them
today – well, what would we think, we who’ve
elaborated our eccentricities with a
patience, a professionalism they never knew?”
A BOY’S OWN STORY, Edmund White.

This chapter has to be prefaced by yet another acknowledgement to the presence of Nanette
Newman in my life. On a trip to New York, she brought back a present for me. It was a little
white bowl and around its rim, in letters and devices of red and blue were the words Le Bol a
Tout Faire. The bowl that does everything. The bowl was to prove cathartic.
No sooner than work on my cottage was finished, I saw the place. The perfect place. From
Worcester Road, from the T-junction outside the Unicorn pub, I glanced up St Anne’s Road one
day and saw the estate agent’s sign hanging from the façade of what had been for years The
Central Hotel. It had started life in the early eighteen hundreds as Drew’s Temperance Hotel.
Poor ‘it’. ‘It’ was indeed run-down, crumbling even. Electric wires like wayward eyebrows
on old men waved half-stiff from the cracked, cream stucco, waiting to be plucked. Paint peeled
like dandruff from the classic Georgian window frames, waiting to be scraped. Even from
outside where I stood, it smelled awful too, like old cabbage and stale white bread and tannin
garnered from a million temperance tea pots. But I loved that building from the moment I saw it,
like seeing that beautiful boy across that crowded square and knowing, just knowing with a
churning stomach-griping certainty that I had found that love that would complete that me. This
was the place where I could both talk the talk and walk the walk and where Nanette’s bowl could
be my grail.
The Central Hotel
 But, with the inanimate but soaringly spiritual object of my affections within grasp, I knew
that I had to nurse my love secretly, privately for at least several days before I could pluck up the
courage to properly introduce myself to it and, as needs drove, ultimately introduce it to … to
them. My parents. They were not going to approve at all.
So, maybe the Central Hotel was Mickey Hannah after all. Mickey come back, returned in a
different form, re-incarnated. Something to live for. Someone, something to love beyond all call;
someone, something to be, inevitably, torn from, wrested away from but which, who, would
remain a part of me until even eternity ran out of space and time.
So, I probably didn’t restrain my passion for too long and it was probably the following day
when I called at Whitt, Yeats and Ridley and asked for a viewing of the Central Hotel. The place
had been empty for a long time. The absent owners wanted £27,000 for it. Did I bargain,
negotiate? I don’t think I did, for who would want to bid for his lover? I wanted it to come to me
as irresistibly as I was presenting myself. There was no possibility of rejection; this was a star-
crossed moment.
The few photographs I have explain the state of interior, of the one and only bathroom for
the five floors of disused rental rooms. Drew’s Temperance Hotel had come down in the world
from the time it had been the lodging place for the servants of those in the smarter of Malvern’s
Spa hotels in the eighteen-forties. It had lately been a doss-house, unloved and unloving, a place
for the not-very-mighty fallen to lurk in obscure and miserable destitution before the council, or
a merciful God, took them away.
But it had a beautiful staircase, well-proportioned rooms, marble and slate faced fireplaces
behind the boards which had blocked up the still usable chimneys. In the basement, once the
kitchen, there was an ancient bread oven long abandoned and now covered with dusty rubble as
though in a house on the very outskirts of Pompeii, far enough from the destruction to be still
recognisable as human habitation.
One of the Upstairs Bedrooms
Another Bedroom
 Bread Ovens in Basement
I was so preoccupied with myself – quelle surprise – and ‘the enterprise’ that I hardly
noticed the disaster that was developing in my brother Richard’s family and the wider
implications which that disaster caused. I had had little to do with my brother or his family
except on my mother’s machinations when she had engineered their visit to Homewood and
when my brother, presumably responding in kind, had kindly helped me to move most of my
stuff out and back to storage in Malvern in the unused rooms above the offices of J Evans and
Son in Newtown Road.
For several years, I had vaguely realised that my brother had been suffering from depression.
It was a condition only whispered about and little understood especially by my parents. My
mother’s own ailments and illnesses were never treated with drugs which had names. No; my
mother always took ‘tablets’. To be too knowledgeable about what ailed you and what helped
you was considered by her as being too ‘showy’. Similarly there were conditions that Malvern
people suffered from that were capable of being talked about, ‘respectable’ conditions like
arthritis or ‘migraine’ or plainly obvious physical conditions such as deafness, blindness or a
broken limb. That Richard was suffering from a clinically diagnosable mental condition was not
respectable at all. Manic depression - as his aspect of what became known as bi-polar condition -
was a no-no par excellence.
Least of all, apparently, could the situation be talked about with the sufferer, my brother. Or
his wife. Never were any probing, sympathetic questions asked directly of him about his feelings
or his treatment. My parents were ‘frightened of upsetting him’; Mary and Pat were as scared of
manic depression as they were of that other condition which their other son suffered from –
homosexuality. Hence, that my brother was cumulatively medicated and medicated and then
medicated some more was a regime which they saw maintained, relentlessly, on whatever
stipend that they considered ‘right’ that they pay that week, month or year.
When he wasn’t working which was most of the time, most of his expenses were covered by
my parents although his wife Jenny, seemed to have to work all the time. Maybe she wanted to,
to escape the numbing vacuum which is often how life with a non-responsive spouse can be. My
mother should have known, for that had indeed become her lot. Richard was in dual thrall - to
my parents and their ignorance on one hand and to a serious, poisonous drug regime dished out
by the unaccountable National Health Service on the other. Whether his treatment was ever re-
assessed, I have no idea. Only a suspicion that even if it had been, it had not been restructured
commensurate with any plan of improvement.
I believe he attended therapy sessions for one-on-one cognitive therapy treatment but it was
never explored or discussed or mentioned. His family was therefore left to ‘get on with it’. Worth
a great deal of money by the standards of the day, my father never saw to it that the two boys
were better educated than to be added like extra stodgy flour to the mix that was the pupil
complement at Dyson Perrins school, a local comprehensive where neither boy -surprise,
surprise - prospered. Houses and cars were provided for the family but never more than enough
to survive. To be controlled. To not to become an embarrassment.
Later, many years later, it transpired that we three children all suffered in some way from the
bi-polar proclivities which either our genes or our circumstances had borne. I suspect now, post
therapy, as does my sister, that it was probably a bit of both. It was always my mother who was
considered to be the ‘nervy’ one. However, in the Evans family, there had been a great-Aunt who
had committed suicide. Now, after our own therapy, my sister and I suspect that it was also my
father who, in a perpetual low-level state of constant depression caused by his wartime
experience, engendered more than a minor percentage of the circumstances which bred our
mutual vulnerability to depression, panic and anxiety attack. But then again, like stammering and
our sexuality, we were left obviously on our own to work it all out for ourselves. With that
family history in mind, I shiver from even raising the topic of matters bi-polar regarding my
nephews and great niece. Oh, how I hope they can escape its curse!
Needless to say, my mother exacerbated the ill-effects of depressive potential and kept us all
in our corners. Apart. Unconnected. Too much mingling might expose her own vulnerabilities,
especially the social ones and thus I saw little of any of my siblings. Jenny, my sister-in-law,
helped me to wallpaper my ceilings at the cottage one night but the event made for no intimacy.
My sister, sadly for me but probably sensibly for her, kept to herself far, far away in that girls
school in Wakefield, North Yorkshire, although she too was fated to return one day to the Land
That Time Couldn’t Quite Forget.
I drove up to see her in early October. Must have been for her birthday. I drove around that
part of Yorkshire, taking myself off to Howarth to wallow in all that Bronte sturm und drang and
those moorland willis, dark ‘n’ dreich, before cooking supper for Liz “ … and a friend of
hers in the P.E department called Kate, from Edinburgh. Nice girl.”
And that is how informally I was introduced to the woman with whom my sister would
spend the next twenty-one years of her life. “Dave, this is Kate.” Shows how sensitive I am to
situations. But then, maybe I wasn’t supposed to be told. Maybe I was supposed to guess?
Maybe I was supposed to ignore ‘it’. I don’t think either of us knew how to handle us.
Elizabeth Evans, ‘Liz’, my sister in 2008
 Chapter Twenty-Two

We laughed, we wept, we worked, we slept

Time shared, Time kept, all’s well except
So quiet, Time’s clock, that tick, that tock -
Time’s bought, not lent. Time’s gone, Time’s
spent.
Time came. Time went … It was not meant.
Time did not wait, Time can’t be late.

Eventually, the parents bought the restaurant idea. They had, after all, tasted my food.
However, there was much grumbling about what were they to do with my newly and
‘expensively’ renovated cottage although I had rather thought that it was to have been my home.
However, it was too extravagant a prospect for them to see me working in a property in which I
could also live as well as occupying an otherwise rentable cottage.
I had had to ask the A.F Evans Trust for a loan. I wanted to have to ask Derek Andrew, one
of the trustees, alone but he was trustee only in name. Always my father’s lackey and sometime
doer-of-dirty-deeds, Derek put me straight and re-directed my mistaken approach and thus I had
to ask my father. He never came clean with me as a ‘trustee’ should have done and explained my
position in legal terms so that my conscience and I could deal with the matter.
Dad saw, with stubborn certainty, the whole of grandfather’s pot-of-gold as his own, despite
the appended names of his wife and the children on the paperwork. Derek Andrew and the
family’s solicitor, David Agnew, both trustees, simply went along with my father’s attitude.
At the time of the divorce to which my brother and his wife were irredeemably heading, my
brother’s wife, Jenny, was working for the said Derek’s company. Somebody persuaded her not
to go to court and make a claim on my brother’s wealth for her support. Did she not realise that
on paper, he was worth many dozens of thousands of pounds? ‘Tis said she was urged to accept
whatever the family gave her and that she would be maintained for the rest of her life.
My father must have breathed a sigh of relief that the family hoard, the stash, would remain
intact for a few years longer and that he had been spared being made to grapple with his own
inability to cope with it. If money had been settled on Jenny, publicly, then Richard would have
had a right to claim money and, ergo, so would Elizabeth and I and … whoosh. Gone would be
his power to control us. Well, that’s my theory and so, shoot me down.
But I was working only with what I had; my Putney flat money would not have been enough
to cover the purchase of the Central Hotel and set up the restaurant business. Any overdraft that I
might have been able to negotiate with the bank was not a loan. All too silly, really but no one
told me then that the A.F. Evans money was just as much mine as it was my father’s – at least,
the distributable income was so. But after all, had I been so apprised, I was a nice boy and the
paterfamilias of nice boys are never argued with, are they? Respect, respect.
So silly it was to what I acquiesced, just to save hurting my father’s feelings. And I was to
be charged interest to boot. Talk about insult added to injury. Insult actually had a bottom line in
our house. When he had sold our house in Blackmore Road, Craithie, and acquired the two
cottage properties on North Malvern Road from the trust in order to convert them and make them
his own, did father Pat have to ask anyone? Or to pay interest to anyone? Or even to ask the
other beneficiaries if they objected to his piratical coup?
Me, As My Father Drew Me
 But I was now, through choice, in thrall to my father and because there was so much room at
the Central Hotel, it was held that my cottage would no longer be mine and would be
surrendered. The refurbishment of the hotel would include making me private quarters there and
the cottage would be rented once again. It was to rent immediately, so pretty had I made it. And
for MUCH more money than before, after a minimal investment. Oh, dear doubting dad. No one
else except me gave any thought to the possibility that if my restaurant business failed, David
would be once again out not only of a house, but short a home. Maybe it was considered that
thirty-year-old gay men don’t need homes; all they need is somewhere to sleep.
Here I must raise my hand and confess that I did have a financial strategy behind my passion
because I would hate anyone to think that all that exists within my skull is a fluffy pink marabou
brain. My restaurant aspiration wasn’t only the mad impulse of a spoiled trust-fund baby.
Property, at least its price, was on the move. For the first time in a long time, the prices of
property were rising contingent with the freeing up of access to building society mortgages and
bank loans. I had seen the refurbished cottage in Henley Place command a much higher rental.
Should it have been sold, it would undoubtedly have fetched more than its un-restored
neighbours. I applied the same thinking to the Central Hotel. After the work we were doing on it,
I knew - a knowledge affirmed by the estate agents’ opinion – that if sold, it would fetch
considerably more than the purchase price. Over time, that increase would be greater and
therefore I planned that even if the restaurant project ultimately went ‘ belly up’, the increase in
the property’s value would surely cover any losses that the business might have made.
After the misgivings and the objections and the usual reluctance to demonstratively support
one of his children, I cannot deny that my father pitched in, yet again, providing both the means
to my end and a rod for both our backs. How he did it, working so physically, almost every day,
heavy duty … He was sixty, for heavens’ sake. Now, at almost the same age, I feel weak at the
thought of having to cook lunch for two. I used to feel great guilt about how much of his time my
father was giving. Afterwards, and now, I realise that he did what he did because he wanted to
for himself. It gave him something of a sense of purpose and achievement that merely putting in
the hours at J. Evans and Son did not provide and probably never had provided. As he certainly
wasn’t going to allow J. Evans and Son to pay for a penny’s worth of work that we couldn’t do
ourselves, I was equally constrained in using any money - whatever and however I’d laid hands
on it - to pay someone else to do the work. Wouldn’t have looked right, would it? Local builder’s
son uses the competition to complete work on ‘family’ project? Of course, as soon as I’d
negotiated the loan from my trust, I’d fundamentally surrendered all my rights which had, as if
by transubstantiation, been reborn as the family’s rights. Ugh!
I was too high on the idea of the project not to be able to ignore all the implications, so keen
was I to get going. The work we did was, in its cobbled, amateur, D.I.Y-way amazing. We
created a new kitchen, one that faced front, its window giving onto St Anne’s Road. The
kitchen’s magnolia formica work surfaces were in fact the ceiling of the passage which ran along
the side of the building giving access to the basement. We made ladies and gents loos out of
scratch and gash wood and odd leftover panel-board. We restored what we could restore and
ripped away what was unsalvageable. I insisted that the old bread ovens remained. The roof was
checked and the gutters and walkways around the tiled hipped sections were repaired and
strengthened. As I worked, I felt the presence of great-grandfather George who had famously
built Surplus Cottage in Nursery Road out of odds ’n’ sods he had assembled from the builder’s
yard. The phlegmatic George would have been unsurprised at his descendants’ efforts.
We tore off enough multi-layers of old garish wallpaper to fill several skips. Most of it fell
away from the plaster in iron-hard wholeness, layers laminated by years of smoke-laden
atmosphere and recent damp. Surprisingly, the plaster surfaces beneath were generally good. We
uncovered wonderful cast-iron Doulton-tiled fireplaces and stripped paint from perfect marble
and slate mantel pieces and grate surrounds.
We removed worn and noxious linoleum, acres of cover-all plaster board and yards of some
very dodgy wet carpeting. We stripped doors and floors to reveal marvellous proper-pine
originals and, in the case of the doors, these after being sent away to be dipped in baths of paint-
removing acid, were sealed and polished to be preserved for another century. My arms ached and
my nostrils flare at the memory of the sheer effort involved. The doors’ locks, all beautifully
engraved with makers’ name, were oiled and new keys made for them. They worked as well as
when they’d been installed almost two centuries before.
As the conversion work was visibly drawing to a close, some of Philip Heath’s students
from Malvern College, Alastair Carew Cox in particular, on being told by Phil of the renovations
and the plans for the venture began to come in and pit their A level-and-beyond brains against
the shapes and sizes and surfaces and came up with some wonderful photographs. But more of
those inspirational kids later.
Dais At His Herculean Labours
Dais Getting His Hands Dirty
Georgian Stair by Alastair Cox
 Reflections by Alastair Cox
I made lists. I made list-making one of the finer arts. And I did sums and against those totals
drew some conclusions. Furnishing and fitments – where possible make do and, where not
possible, mend and where impossible, improvise. Never did I think of doing much research as to
the business potential of my venture in the neighbourhood – most of the competition came, or
was brought, to me.
The name of my venture, Le Bol a Tout Faire, was an immoveable, sine qua non, fixed in
time ’n’ tears pre-requisite. That in Malvern Wells there was a very fancy, high-faluting, up-
scale, high-end restaurant called LE CROQUE EN BOUCHE, I entirely ignored. When I was
forced to confront the competition, in my arrogance I thought that each might derive mutual
benefit from the poncey French names – asking for a French restaurant in Malvern, I fancied that
a yokel passer-by might easily direct a putative Croque en Bouche punter to my door instead.
There were no other restaurants to speak of, then, in the town. Pubs had only just started serving
food. Maybe I was in with half a chance?
Curtain material was chosen, as was the fabrics for table cloths and napkins. All was of
Sanderson design and came – bargain basement, sale-only prices – from Gordon Smith’s shop on
Church Street. My journal records I bought seventy yards, fifty of which cost me £49.50. Paint
colours were chosen, argued and fought over and finally applied. My mother pulled out the
family’s sewing machine and made magic. That old Singer must have made miles of curtains and
wardrobes full of clothes in its three generations of useful life. Carpets and coir matting for the
hallway, stairs and corridors came from the same shop on North Malvern Road at the junction of
Cowleigh Road which had been grandfather’s and in which he had housed the ironmongery
division of his enterprise. And of course everything that had been made or fitted or provided in
my Henley Place cottage was re-invented and utilised in the hotel. For example, the green
bedroom carpet and the cottage stair carpet became bathroom carpet in the hotel. ‘Et cetera, et
cetera’, as the King declared to Deborah Kerr in the film musical of THE KING AND I. “Will it
be ready soon?” was the question every passer-by seemed to ask.
The Entrance After Renovations
 After Restoration

Soon seemed a long time coming and my body ached and my little mini-van groaned
beneath the weight of materials and equipment, respectively exported to the dump and imported
as replacement. In time, the front windows were dressed, tables furnished and life was made
considerably easier with my finances when the Automobile Association sent me an insurance
cheque to cover the huge cost of repairing the accident damage to the van. Whoopee! The
cheque, by rights, should have gone to my mother but when offered it, she shrugged and replied
that she had no use for it. Thanks, mother.
But with every gift came the promise of yet more guilt.
Whilst I was still living at the cottage, there took place at least a couple of meetings with Ed.
They are all and each in my journal but I cannot face exhuming what is now finally dead. Then,
it was different. Apparently unable to leave our pain where it lay moaning at the side of our road
and afraid to put it out of its own mortal misery, Ed came up once to Malvern to see my new
home in the cottage and I visited Homewood a couple of times. It had taken him not very long to
tire of James Carter’s charms and he had found others in the shape of the young Portuguese boy
Jacques who had been the lover of Richard Sweet, the owner and manager of The Oasis Club.
Changing partners had never been easier.
Jacques was pretty, dark haired and olive-skinned and also pretty mono-syllabic but he
smiled a lot and patently took to Ed’s pork sword like a neck of lamb leaps at stuffing. Thus,
Portuguese Jacques was ensconced at Homewood before English Jack Robinson’s name had
even been thought of let alone mentioned. Jan Murray appeared content with the arrangement but
in my eyes and to my ears and certainly in my heart, Homewood was not the same and never
would be. I felt silly and painfully de trop as Ed, performing an impressive volte face, cooked
and made expensive dinners and played the host with the most. It can’t have been nice for
Jacques, either, having me around and it was shit for me.
I thought - no, I hoped - that Ed’s and my friendship might have had a chance but after
making plans with him for a return visit to Scotland together in summer seventy-nine, what I had
fancied would be a company of Ed and I alone turned out to be a voyage a trois. Jacques came
too and sat in the front seat of the new Landrover which Ed had added to his Rolls Royce and
Jaguar fleet.
Since I had left, the purse strings had been well and truly cut loose. I fancy that in order to
be Ed, Ed felt that he had to be SEEN to be rich as well as to be KNOWN to be so. Or, being
charitable, perhaps he just liked big, expensive fast cars? He was making many changes, one of
which fundamental to his ‘new’ life being a new name. The phantom of his Polish father had
always stirred powerful inside him and he decided to become Raphael Beldovsky. I no more
knew the new Ed than I had been able to understand the old. His father’s ghost was ultimately to
reel him back into the very heart of the old country, although Ed’s final truck with Warsaw and
that irredeemable past was to come much later.
The thread which constrained my tolerance and understanding snapped. Somehow I got
through the Scottish trip, bumped around on a hard banquette in the back of the workaday
Landrover but it was a tearful and embarrassing return to Edinburgh. I have a horrible memory
of becoming almost hysterical in Kenny Jackson’s house where it had been arranged we would
stay. After we returned south, I don’t think I ever saw Ed again except for once when, some
fourteen years later he came to Ripplevale Grove with, not Jacques who had long been
superannuated, but the first of a succession of Polish boys whose talents as ‘models’ Ed was
trying to encourage. Some Poles proved that they were able to turn their hands to many uses but
Ed’s ‘models’ used their hands for just the one thing.
But I still had other friends from my Bath ‘n’ Bristol days. Or so I thought. I made regular
forays back to Bristol to see Robert Cork and, when he was at home and alive, his friend Roger
MacNichol, the air steward. I also went to dance at the Oasis. At first, I thought this connection
could still work but there always the spectre of Ed, always some kind, considerate and thoughtful
someone telling me how they had seen Ed, been to dinner at Homewood, drunk with him in
Hinton Charterhouse. And I never knew what killed Roger. Might he not have been an early
victim?
After meeting a hairdresser/fashionisto called Shawn and after we had both been
disappointed after a night in my cottage in Malvern, I drove him back to Bristol and turned round
and returned to Malvern never to go to Bristol again. There was, contrary to an earlier
perception, a great deal immorality west of Oxford although, unlike immorality in London,
everyone seemed to know about it. And gossip about it. Funny – being gossiped about in London
was rather edifying; in the country, it was terrifying. To borrow from Oscar Wilde, it was a case
of being Ernest in town and Jack in the country.
 The Ghost On The Stairs
But in the pursuit of whatever immorality there was - God! How I’d so like to be able to call
it love - there was also the horizon of Birmingham to be discovered and explored. There were
clubs and bars there too, the Grosvenor, the Nightingale in Wilton House at Aston and The Jester
but even there, I could not escape the reminders of Ed. David Fowler, the apprentice Doctor
who’d set his cap at Ed and Jack Dervan, his friend who had NOT set his cap at me were two
such eloquently smug reminders. Immorality had lost its spark. I seem to have tried immorality
almost everywhere and it was starting to pall.
Robert Cork and some of his friends were regular visitors to Malvern over the next year or
so but when Robert’s career took him to work on the Evening News in London, he too had no
need to keep up with a ‘woz-kid’ in the sticks.
No sooner than I had closed the door to Bristol and Bath and found nothing to be desired in
Birmingham, I was to have little or no time for socialising much outside Malvern. The Central
Hotel became Le Bol a Tout Faire and I found that I had bred a monster … It was to consume
me.
It was a time for being gathered, too. All in my harem of older ladies were on their way out.
My granny Bray, Annie, my sole surviving grand parent, was at least able to come and see both
the cottage and my restaurant before the dementia from which she was increasingly suffering
became her passport to heaven’s waiting room, first in a home in Alexandra Road and then
finally in what was once a girls’ private school not five hundred yards from the cemetery in
Malvern Wells where she would join her husband Steve in a plot which my mother never had
marked. My mother could not cope with my grandma’s mental vagaries. Indeed, it takes a saint
to do so but on the other hand, it doesn’t take a saint to mark their family’s graves.
My godmother, Barbara Meaking, nee Moulder, once my mother’s bridesmaid, also pegged
out about this time from a disease no one named but which, oddly, developed in a way that Aids
was indelibly so to do for many people in the eighties to come. She once wheezed at me when
suffering almost deliriously from a bout of bronchitic pneumonia: “I don’t like anything new –
except paint.” She had been widowed for some years. She’d worked in a bank for years and her
very late marriage to a man called Meaking was short-lived. He wasn’t particularly nice but dear
old Ba left me £500 in her will and I hope I repaid her acknowledgement of me by naming a
character after her in A CAT IN THE TULIPS.
I visited Nellie Creese in Hanley Castle village a couple of times before I saw her last.
During one winter she slipped and fell and broke her hip. I visited her too in the Royal Infirmary
in Worcester. With good health and innocent of any other life, her existence in her tied-cottage
had been possibly something of an idyll. Without health and mobility, her cottage nest became a
death-trap. Her demise was, finally, the end of the feudal era in Hanley Castle village. The
Lechmeres had left Severn End which was converted into apartments and rented and the
manorial couple themselves had moved into a sort of newly-built bungalow thing opposite the
lodge and imposing gates of their former address. It was people like David Agnew, our family
solicitor, who now occupied the Tudor rooms of the great half-timbered house at Severn End.
Trade was making inroads into the professions and the latter were invading the aristocracy. But
then, plus ca change…
Worst was the departure of Marjorie McKee, who began to suffer the wobbling and
distressing effects of a brain tumour. It was finally excised although the surgeons couldn’t
remove it all. Whatever recovery she made was cruelly temporary. She was incapacitated further
and spent her last months catheterised, drugged almost to the point of slurring incoherence and
was the palest shade of that former sparkly, jolly Irish woman we had both as individuals and as
a family come to know and love. But Marjorie was able at least to come to lunch at the restaurant
when it was finished.
My mother, never good with the sick and hospitals for fear she might get to know too much
about the ‘wrong sort of disease’, stayed away until I had made the journey to Birmingham to
visit Marjorie. Even at thirty, not the tenderest age and not one oblivious to death, I had however
never seen someone in such a reduced physical state and I learned a lot about life that day.
Death I had known from 1973 when Micky Hannah’s plane had come down in Ermenonville
but that sort of life to which Marjorie had been reduced shocked me into a sobering realisation
about mortality and of the probability of its being preceded by cruel decline and decay. “Age
shall not wither them …” and all that. “Nor the years condemn …”
And, after all the whimsy, the irrefutable fact that unless we choose, we have no choice.
Michael Hannah
 Chapter Twenty-Three

I’ve walked where history was made,

Where fate and destiny have preyed,
I’ve marvelled at the march of man
And caught my chances as catch can.
There’s no telling who you’ll meet
Or where you’ll go or how,
The journey is what matters most,
No better time to start than now.

I had had business cards printed, so much folly on one such tiny piece of paper. I had
planned to open from ten-thirty in the morning to – perhaps – mid-night and even beyond.
Morning coffee, luncheon, afternoon tea and dinner. Restaurateurs are not known for throwing
customers out at an arbitrary curfew hour. Those that are, rarely stay in business.
My ‘teaser’ advertisements in the Malvern Gazette had read “In Malvern, Le Bol a Tout
Faire means welcome!” This august organ duly took it upon itself, three months early, to
announce that the opening would be on Tuesday 25th March 1980. The months before the
opening, when I would have to prove that my name meant welcome and that there was proof in
the pudding, were wearying. I note many journal entries concerning fatigue, back pain, head and
muscle aches and depression … maudlin, gloomy thoughts. Lots of mentions of reading Sylvia
Townshend Warner poems. Because I was at my father’s mercy and there was (he had) no
schedule of works, the frustrations and exhaustion resulting from always asking and pleading,
begging and wheedling took the whole situation out of my control. A sense of powerlessness
breeds a truly revolutionary zeal. Ask Lenin. And, in turn, Lech Walesa.
 The Business Card
It was thus at the end of November when the point of no return was reached. I’d read it in
the papers. It must be true. Coincidental with the Malvern Gazette’s announcement, the
conveyancing process at Agnew’s solicitors came to an end. I knew because I immediately
received a sort of contract from the trustees, an agreement that as soon as signed made it
incumbent on me to pay monthly interest on my ‘loan’ from the A.F. Evans Trust. Trust, in
Evans-speak, was obviously a one-way street – where did they think I might escape to? Carrying
a five storey building with me?
Always afraid of money, just like my father, I watched the costs mount after the £27,500 had
been paid over to buy the property. By the 1st December when I watched, remotely, my former
principal and raison d’etre Cat Stevens performing for the last time on stage at a concert at the
Wembley Pool, I had calculated that, over and above the £27,000 I had paid for the Central
Hotel, I would have spent an extra £10,000 on fitting the place up and out. In addition there was
outstanding the amount of £2,800 at which my ‘bill’ at J Evans and Son stood.
Strange, I felt nothing when I watched Steve and the band -Alan, Jean, Larry and Gerry -
playing themselves out writing their own obituary. There was nothing I saw with which I had
anything even remotely to do. Presumably, after that show, Steve would have wandered away
with his money too and wondered, deep down, if what he was about to do was anything else but
pure passion. Although it hadn’t been announced as ‘the farewell performance’, the Wembley
concert was thus widely acknowledged. So, December 1979 was to prove the end and the
beginning for Steve too. At the demise of a dead decade and the beginning of another, still being
carried in the womb of time, my own fate also pivoted on a fulcrum of utter foolhardiness. In
Steve’s case it was, fundamentally, of religious significance. In mine it was purely financial.
 Cat Stevens, As We Once Thought He Was
It was the wider implication involved in the application for a licence to serve alcohol on my
premises which brought much of the foolhardy aspect of both my venture and my return to
Malvern into consequence. Through David Agnew, my trustee/solicitor – what, do I hear you
murmur, about a conflict of interest? – I had made application to the local magistrates for my
table licence, the permission to be legally entitled to offer alcohol for profit as an accompaniment
to the food I served. It seems almost ludicrous in 2008 to be writing about this arcane procedure
to gain such ‘permission’ but … hey. I had understood that my record and background would be
examined to ensure that I was a ‘suitable’ person to whom such ‘permission’ might be ‘granted’
and I realised that the ‘little problem’ I had engendered with the law on that towpath in Putney
some five or so years before would be revealed in the investigations. So, I decided to come clean
with Lawyer Agnew and told him about it. Well, I recounted the incident in terms of the
conviction I had received rather than what actually happened. Little point in protesting after the
event.
Even shorn of detail, David Agnew displayed little or no shock and horror at my tale and
rather calmly advised that in his opinion, the matter would have no bearing on my current
application. Much relieved and as green as uncut grass, I awaited the call from the authorities to
be interrogated and in due course, someone from the police arrived at the door of the hotel
disguised behind the mask of a classic poker face. And of course, he was forewarned and thus
forearmed and the subject of my conviction for ‘gross indecency’ emerged pretty swiftly.
“Yes,” I confessed as brick dust rose in a cloud from my sweating person, “‘twas me,
officer. Very sorry. Never happen again.” Et cetera et cetera. He went away, with his ‘po’ face
only to return a day or so later to rub his knowledge of me home …
As Queen Elizabeth the first, played by Glenda Jackson, might have sworn, “God’s death!”
Me? I had to bite my lip and curse under my breath.
I realise that I was being made aware that the police ‘knew’ about me. I felt so grubby,
dirtier than from any physical grime I might have acquired from my honest labours. I grew up
another notch that day as I realised that should there ever be any question of importunate
behaviour in the locality concerning any person under the age of - then - twenty-one, I would be
one of the prime suspects. The forces of law ‘n’ order would come a-knocking at my door before
they called on any of the un-convicted homos of which there were several, un-admitted, not-yet-
out in the town. Strange - the longer I remained in the town, the more sightings of homo-homo
were reported to me. Thus sharpened, even my own defective gaydar improved. Had I been led
to this place of public exposure merely pour encourager les autres? The others, surely, seemed
encouraged enough, without my help.
I also realised that potentially damaging knowledge about me would be let loose and what I
knew about the gossiping tongues of English small towns and villages conjured my worst fear –
that my parents would get to hear about ‘it’. Such talk in the confines of a police station wouldn’t
trickle down to most people but then most people weren’t related to the Chairman of the local
bench of Magistrates. Whatever I thought of my father on a personal level did not mean that I
wanted him to be shamed by revelations from my past. I was much sobered as I stood in the dock
of the court when the bench heard my investigated application for a drinks licence. I never knew
whether word had in fact trickled down to my father who was not, of course, sitting on the bench
that day. Instead, I just carried on pretending … Of course, second worst fear was that ‘knowing
about’ me might just repel the punters!
What did further affect my personal relations with my father was nothing to do with the gay
thing. My ‘trusted’ trustee/solicitor at last explained the terms of the licence I had been
‘allowed’. It was though he was revealing one of the mysteries of the universe. I would only be
allowed to serve alcohol on the ground floor of the premises in the restaurant room. Any thought
of using the upstairs rooms as a ‘function’ suite or even for private dinner parties - as per my
intention of developing the upstairs floors - was not only technically defused but practically
disarmed. The huge amount of extra work and expense that I had invested developing the house
on anything but the ground floor was merely that I should be able to house myself. I could have
saved a great deal of money and enjoyed a perfectly acceptable life in my little cottage had I -
and my father - been told this earlier. The upstairs floors could have remained in their time-warp,
exactly as they had been found.
Instead of carping and attempting to negotiate, I caved in and in order to ‘settle’ my account
with J. Evans and Son and to remove any ammunition that could be used against me in the
future, I gave my parents back all the furniture which I had been left from my grandfather’s
house after his death. Had they decided to sell it – which I also could have done at any time in
the past eight years – even at auction the furniture would have realised far more than the £2,800
bill with which I would otherwise have had to have struggled. To my amazement, they didn’t sell
it but absorbed it into their household at Lodge Cottage. Maybe, since Bert’s death, they had
developed some sentiment for ‘the family’ after all because between us, my sister and I still have
the quantity of it and our parents are both long dead. What a good thing I wasn’t using it as a
bargaining chip now, in 2008, when ‘brown furniture’ – as ‘the trade’ calls such effects – is
almost as worthless as money itself might become.
As I painted and panted and scraped and sanded in the hotel, I still found myself thinking of
Homewood and the lie of its lawns and land, the fit of it between sky and England. I thought
about it and the further past, the rock’n’roll past more and more and certainly more than was
healthy. Both are etched like visions of the devil on my mind. “ … Maybe it is the past
which is in fact the evil with which we all grapple, our own devil. I seem to
have total recall and it is that very inability to forget which poisons the
anticipation of what the future might hold …” Believe me, when you’re a woz-kid, you
know you’re a woz-kid, never more to be a force with which to be reckoned. That mindset rather
takes the ‘me’ out of ‘meaning’.
In order to further continue my diabolical connections, it seems that my telephone was
installed in December 1979 by Jim G…., a GPO engineer who returned several times ‘just to
chat’. He was another married one, rather unhappily, I gathered. Born in Surrey Quays in
dockland London he seemed to have intimate knowledge of all the gay pubs south of the river
and several more on the north side. By now terrified of the ‘word’ having been put about the
town concerning me and my particular bent, I desisted from further, closer acquaintance. I
seemed, according to my journal, to do this too often for my own sexual health. But Le Bol was
at last connected to the other world, on Malvern 67499. It was later changed to Malvern 3713
after which Jim sensibly vanished from my life.
In that other world, when I ventured back to London which I seemed to do as often as I
could, I seemed to spend most of my time at LEGENDS in the West End in who’s ever company
I could insert myself. I record once that we had spent teatime with the painter Bryan Organ in his
studio who I had met when he had made a formal portrait of John Reid and was about to essay
the Forbes family, I believe. On another occasion in the same club, we spent the evening with
Eric Hall, the means of the demise of Sarah’s engagement to John Reid – who bought us all
rounds of drinks. The Killer Queen indeed. Another evening encompassed this motley crew: Me,
Sarah Forbes, Mark Phillips, Josie Pollack, Michael Summerton and his friend Ian, Billy Gaff,
Mike Gill, Rod and Alana Stewart, Steven Gill, John Reid, Eric Hall, James Newton Howard and
his wife, Peter Straker and … and finally Freddie Mercury arrived. Freddie had a new beau on
his arm, married and rather lovely if I remember rightly. Freddie bent down and whispered in my
ear with shimmering camp:
“And, my dear, guess where he lives?”.
“So, tell,” I grinned.
“Leatherhead, darling! Isn’t that divine?!” And off they went into their night. Oh, how I miss
that naughty Freddie and his wonderful innocent delight in being him and him only! And how at
the time I worried about his safety …
Overnight, the fairy had waved her wand and the following day, it was back to Malvern and
back to removing a hundred years’ worth of tin tacks from the floor boards, making tea for the
gas man, the painters and being charming and interesting with Mr Crippen, the fastidiously
correct Mr Crippen the Health Inspector. It’s hard being charming and interesting when plaster
dust and ancient cobwebs combine with sweat and snot to form crusty excrescences hanging
from your nose and clinging to your eyebrows.
Over Christmas that year I seemed to leap from one needlepoint project to the other, each
one being mounted as soon as the last stitch had been put in ready for hanging on the restaurant
wall. When I finished those nine individual needlepoints of the windows and doors in the facade
of the hotel, I fancied that the end of the refurbishment was nigh and that the birth of Le Bol a
Tout Faire, like Frank ‘n’ Furter’s diabolic creation of the beautiful but hollow Rocky, was
imminent.
With whoever I could, be it Felicity Dean or Phil and Christine Heath or anyone who was in
my purlieu, the talk always seemed to be of ‘art’. Art and artists, what ‘it’ was and who ‘they’
were. Of course we never called ourselves ‘one’ but I suppose we were all desperate to be
thought to be doing ‘it’ and being ‘one’. Trouble is, it’s always up to someone else to call what
you are doing ‘it’ and therefore for you to be able to consider yourself as ‘one’. Having seen the
mechanics behind the working of the music business, I suppose I was loathe to delve too deeply
into those which turned the cogs of the gearing controlling the art world.
I was pressing ahead with my needlepoint, almost excessively, as though I was being
impelled. Thirty years later, the impulse is still with me. I was badly impatient, a curse when you
work in a medium which is so constricting and so lengthy and time-consuming, unlike painting.
Even Phil Heath’s pots took comparatively less time. He could make fifty pots in the time it
takes me to make even a reasonably-sized needlepoint. But I had to press on, felt that I must and
yet I didn’t know why, burdened as my confidence was by the memory of being told how
hopeless I was at ‘art’ whilst at school. So why sew?
Thirty years after I stitched my first stitch, I do know why as I look back over my lifetime’s
body of work which I trust will still be much added to. Now I can see why I had to do it, to make
it, and that knowledge pleases me without any validation from ‘them’. I have done my work for
one reason and one reason only – to please and gratify and thus to fulfil myself. From the outset,
I knew I would never from choice make up the designs of others. I have never and will never do
kits. Sorry, Mr Ehrman. Without my wool and needle, even writing would have been a hollow
and un-companionable activity. I always say, when asked, the needlepoint is merely me not
writing. However, writing is not me not needlepointing. If you see any sense in that, PLEASE
contact me!
My First Needlepoint
 My Eighth Needlepoint

The Only Slate Here Is On The Roof

And, now that I have learned to combine writing (poetry) with and in the wool, I have found
a satisfaction surpassing fulfilment. I don’t need to be told that what I do is good. I don’t need to
have my work displayed and priced and bargained over and sought after. I just simply and deeply
and unashamedly love it being there. If my work is ‘it’ and I am, therefore, ‘one’, so be it. It
really isn’t up to me to say.
I have been recently much encouraged by the ceramicist Grayson Perry who in his
autobiography, guided by Wendy Jones, makes mention of ‘The Outsider’. He embraces such a
person and their work under the umbrella term Art Brut, the latter meaning work created by
spontaneous, untrained artists who make art outside the art world. Citing the example of the
American expressive Henry Darger, Grayson continues: “He
never showed his art; he was
an Outsider Artist because he had no training … and he wasn’t exposed to
collectors and exhibitions … composition and colour are outstanding; the writing
in his opus was articulate and his vocabulary mature … (he works) without being
aware of art history or what the outside world thinks of it (his work) or wants.
(Working the way I do) was though I was in prison while my imagination was the
exercise yard and I allowed all the parts of myself to go out into that imaginary
world and be themselves … I experience the world, allow it to stew then I find a
way of putting it out there in the simplistic language of pottery. Pottery is not
a very effective way of conveying complex thoughts and so I have to communicate
what I hope are diverse ideas within the limited vocabulary of ceramics.”
If Grayson Perry, no mean wordsmith himself, felt like this about his own work, it is exactly
how I feel about mine. Substitute the word ‘needlepoint’ for ‘ceramics’ and there, as my dear
friend Mister Mercury would say, you have it. My father used to refer to my work as ‘your
embroidery’. Perhaps, indeed, it should be left at that. Dismissed. But not very deep down, oh
how I privately wish that when I’m all dust and gone, someone might accord me the accolade of
‘Outsider’ and my ‘embroidery’ the status of ‘it’.
Thanks, Grayson. Your words focused and dispelled any uncertainty I might have had.
But, soft … I still needed to furnish and equip a restaurant.
Needing other decorative work to set off all the ‘art’, I made great friends at the furniture
store MFI in Cheltenham from where I bought all the restaurant’s tables, chairs and the furniture
which I had planned to go in the upstairs rooms. Willy-nilly, private parties or no, I was now
determined that the place be properly furnished if it was going to be my home even if in the
upstairs rooms I had been precluded from making money. To ameliorate the parlous plight of the
finances, I continued to buy and sell antique pieces, blue and white china and pieces of jewellery
being the objects traded and articles of furniture for the hotel being bought with the profits. Joan
Coates in her neighbouring ‘bijou’ shop on the corner of St Anne’s Road became a customer as
did other Malvern dealers Jean Preece and Sonia Black.
And Phil Heath got his London exhibition, grace a Madame Pan Casson Henry, the owner
of the aforementioned prestigious gallery we had visited in Marylebone High Street. When I
drove Phil and his pots up to London, I was already the proud possessor of the pot and pierrot he
and Christine had made of my hotel. Later, I was to acquire a piece which I call BREAKING
FREE, depicting a naked man struggling to break free from the materials and the place of which
he is made. My little van had never borne such precious and carefully packed cargo. Phil’s
appearance on Pebble Mill at one television magazine programme had started his ball rolling and
at school he was being treated with a new respect, especially by Bill Denny, his putative boss at
the Art Block. Out of some thirty pieces, Phil sold thirteen at the Casson Gallery which was
visited by some pretty impressive company, much of which had been drummed up by me and my
friends.
Le Bol A Tout Faire by Philip Heath
 By the twenty-first of February, the central heating in Le Bol was finished and by the twelfth
of March, most if not all of my furniture and ‘stuff’ had been moved up from the cottage in order
that I be able to spend a first night in my new bedroom on the second floor of my folly. The
name of the Central Hotel had been removed from the glazed panel above the front door and the
sandwich board, painted by my father, proclaiming LE BOL A TOUT FAIRE stood ready in the
hall to be exhibited in the street outside to lure the flies to the spider.

The Dining Room

I hadn’t cooked - except for family - for weeks but had been studiously amassing practical
recipes with which all and sundry seemed expert enough to supply me. Favourite johnny-come-
lately was a soup called Hobby, passed on by Phil Heath’s family who, like my granny Evans,
came from in and around Burslem in the Staffordshire Potteries. “Potatoes, onions, bit of meat
and some carrots …” I’d been told.
“And then what?”
“Put it all together,” came the answer, “and boil it to buggery.” Not unlike the recipe for my
own dear life, I thought to myself. But I could never recreate it. And never tried. Why? Any gay
boy’ll tell you there’s not a lot worth much beyond buggery.
The night before I opened the door to ‘them’ - ‘they’ had been commuted from my family to
my prospective customers - I lay very early in bed, alone in the great house and looked out of the
window at the craggy promontory of bare rock which overlooked Malvern, on a similar contour
to that of St Ann’s Well. I saw – all right, I COULD SWEAR I saw – the figure of an Ancient
Briton, a handsome, healthy warrior dressed in both fabric and fur, beard and dark, free locks
flowing long and full, standing sentry-like with tall spear in hand, looking out over the wooded
valley below him. He turned and, even though a full quarter mile away, looked at me and was
then gone. I looked again and then I looked again but he never returned. But he was as real as
real.
The night before, I had been telephoned by Charles Laurence, my friend and, as a
playwright, my former client to be told that our mutual friend, the actor Tony Beckley had died
in Los Angeles from cancer. Tony had been my former boss Barry Krost’s lover for eighteen
years and had ultimately followed the fickle Barry to California where Tony had at last starred in
a film that Barry had made with him; WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. It was Tony’s last work
and it had been a huge success, making a film producer of Barry - once child-star in Hollywood,
once hairdresser, once theatrical agent, once music artistes’ manager - with whom Tony had
fallen in love so many years before and had helped with his support and love to the success Barry
now enjoyed. Co-incidentally, Tony’s beautiful Afghan hound Luke, who had been left behind in
England, died the same day.
Like many a British warrior before him, neither was Tony ever to return to the land of his
birth. By the time he died, Tony didn’t want to. He expressed a wish to be buried next to Tyrone
Power in the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery and … Guess what?
The day following my receipt of the news about Tony was the 25th March 1980, a Tuesday.
Was I to sink? Was I to swim? Just what IS a petard?
 Chapter Twenty-Four

‘Tissaid that the joy in those moments of

triumph
Eclipses the flame of a lifetime of toil
But those moments are fleeting as I can bear
witness
Achievement’s a dish that can easily spoil
If only I’d known at the very beginning
It’s striving that matters, the doing’s the
glory
The end brings a high price to pay for your
labours
The work is the meaning, full stops tell no
story.

So now I had it. My own restaurant. And I had Carol Amos. Without Carol Amos I would
not have been able to even opened the front door on that first day. Carol, mother of Ashley and
Dilys and wife to Riddian, worked mainly at a care home south of Graham Road. She cooked.
And she cared. And I think she cared for me. She made the scones and pies and tarts and pastry
after the fashion and to the recipes I had set and she did it superbly. Thanks Carol. And thanks
Ash, too, for her fourteen-year-old son Ashley was my washer-upper when the need arose. Cash
they needed and cash I paid. If the Amoses were the faces of what was becoming known as ‘the
black economy’, thank heavens for them. Wages are wages to those who have only ever known
one sort of money. It’s patronising to tell them otherwise and to encourage them to think that
their future lies in bank accounts and bonds and stocks and shares and to expect them to take to
saving and to paying mortgages on time is to mis-judge their desire to be like ‘us’.
I also had Sorrel Merrick, who was my stalwart waitress. Wonderful character. I hope she
went on to make a wonderful life. One night we had Rabbit Pie on the menu. It was Sorrel who
replied thus to a customer’s question as to the nature of the rabbit pie. “You’ve heard of
Watership Down?” she asked.
“Yes,” came the amused reply.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve read the book, you saw the film, now try the pie!” Kate Clough, a
quieter and probably more solid soul of a mere sixteen summers accompanied Sorrel but they
rarely worked together. Sorrel was un-dilutable. She liked the floor to herself.
My mother, for a while, volunteered for the morning coffee shift, ten ‘til twelve-thirty. She
yearned to do it, ached to attend to the needs of a whole new raft of people who might save her
from the atrophying boredom which afflicts so many middle-aged, middle-class women, whose
nests had emptied and who were now ‘home alone’.
On that first day, I recorded that we took £55 and by the end of the first week the takings
totalled £381. However, I had had to spend £359 on a microwave oven from Rebecca Vickers
catering suppliers in Cheltenham. I had discovered a terrifying Achilles Heel in the operation, the
problem of keeping the food hot, to serve it hot. With no other means at my disposal, the
microwave, used judiciously, was not merely invaluable but indispensable. Without it I would
have had to have provided only a cold menu! It was an extraordinary price to pay for a piece of
equipment then. Recently in 2007, I bought a microwave oven at Tesco for less than twenty-five
pounds. It does exactly what I wanted the first one to do – heat stuff up quickly and efficiently.
Having realised at the end of that first week that I was making a loss, my gut-running funk
was mollified by a phenomenon I hadn’t bargained for – tips. Gratuities. Service charge. I must
have thought about tips and being tipped when I was grappling with the restaurant concept. After
all, I had become used to tipping others and had never shied away. I didn’t note the amount of
that first week’s gratuities but there must have been – even at a ten per cent ratio – thirty-eight
pounds. I always shared the day’s tips with whoever was working on the night, even the washer-
upper. So, if on duty were Sorrel, Ashley and myself, the tips were shared three ways. So, my
share at the end of the week would have been about four pounds.
Sounds not very much today, thirty years later but then it was VERY useful and for once I
did bear in mind that the business would be assessed willy-nilly by the inland revenue as having
received tips. I usually used my tips to buy furniture and ‘objets’, things that could be sold,
hopefully for a profit when the tax demands came in. When the accountants had done their work
at the end of my period of trading, I was most gratified to know that I had been trading at a fifty-
one percent profit level. To one who never knew about such hairy financial things, that sounded
pretty good.
By and by, the drinks licence manqué was revised and I was able to cater for private supper
parties upstairs and I am told that the ambience of the room complemented by either Sorrel or
Kate serving drinks and the food, made for memorable evenings. Later in the year I opened, I
hosted an annual magistrates’ dinner in that upstairs room, a booking I’m sure which must have
come due to my father. I never told any of my customers that the room and the landing off which
it led was haunted. At night, sitting there alone, I have often heard footfalls on the stairs when
there was no one else in the house. The first floor landing on those occasions was always very
cold and indeed the coldness spread into the public sitting room. Footfalls would then be heard
descending the staircase. As my telephone room – a small four by four – also occupied the
landing space, I deduced that the footfalls and the cold presence might have been a maid, a very
elderly ‘tweenie’ whose job it might have been once to empty the accumulated ‘slops’ several
times a day. In the days when the hotel had been first built, there was no running water, no piped
or drained waste disposal system and the sewage would have had to have been manually
removed, later to be emptied into the soil cart which would have taken the waste away to be
recycled on local fields and vegetable gardens … The ‘loo’ in the eighteen-thirties would have
been in my telephone room. But there was never a sense of malignance or distress; merely a
weariness beyond rest.
Talking of which, I was forced into realising I had bitten off an un-chewable chunk of life
when half my face became numb and pins and needles started prickling down my arms and into
my finger tips. I was exhausted. Rising before eight every morning – EVERY morning of the
week – working all day and often ‘til mid-night was taking its toll. I consulted the good Doctor
Robin Steel in Worcester and he told me in no uncertain terms to slow down. Reduce my hours.
Impossible, dear doctor, given my cash flow. Well, almost impossible.
One reduction that I realised that I could reasonably make was to adhere to the catering
industry norm that existed in the provinces in those days which was to close on Mondays. I did,
forthwith. The next was to terminate the morning coffee sessions. I will expand on the
circumstances of that closure later but suffice to say that I used the uncluttered mornings to work
in a more relaxed way and I delegated, giving more to Carol to cook. Her pies and pastry had
always been infinitely superior to mine.
I also tried to give up smoking again. I had been a smoke-free zone for the year or so before
opening the business. The night before I opened my doors, sitting in the empty restaurant, I
succumbed and bought a pack of Marlboro from the vending machine in the pub next door. I
don’t think I stopped again until 1991.
My exhaustion forced me into taking on more evening staff and for a while my fears of
cash-flow crises and commercial extinction diminished. You see, the auguries seemed good –
Egon Ronay’s editorial team had called and I and my enterprise was about to be featured in a
new book about places to eat for £5.00. I was also advised that the Automobile Association, my
WONDERFUL guardian angel A.A., was going to somehow, somewhere, feature Le Bol as the
best new restaurant which had opened IN THE MIDLANDS! So, with the promise of a rosy
future, it was with a light and welcoming heart that I greeted Lyndon Holloway as he walked
past the kitchen window one day.
 I had known Lyndon in London. He worked as a promotions man for record companies, I
believe RCA. Promotions men pushed people’s records at radio stations, made sure they got onto
‘the play list’. Most didn’t.
Lyndon knew my one time client Peter Straker well and was especially friendly with the
BBC disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman who, among other gay pop radio celebrities, always came
to Lyndon’s parties off Lavender Hill south of the river. Lyndon, like me, had quit the music
industry and – somehow – had found himself living in Worcester and was, in 1980, settled with
one Jeremy, a hairdresser. Sweet boy. For a while from that meeting Lyndon and I were friends;
he would come over to dinner with Jeremy and after the punters had left, we would sit with a
bottle of wine in the darkened restaurant, dishing and gossiping and it was SO relaxing to be able
to thus unwind.
It was a very welcome friendship from my point of view. His stories complemented my
stories and I felt that I could with some justification open up a little to Malvern people about my
show business past which, without vindication and without independent corroboration, sounded
like the horrid braggadocio of an insufferable queen.
And so, flattered and desperate, I made the usual personnel bloomer and employed my new
best friend. It’s such a grubby feeling to have to work with someone who just doesn’t, ultimately,
like you. I felt Lyndon’s respect for me go first and then of course the nastiness set in. I had
agreed to pay him £70 a week to run the front of house part of the operation. I thought the
relationship might have worked but after an exchange of insults one night – I wincingly
remember him hurling the epithet ‘amateur’ at me, followed by that echoingly hurtful term
‘cheap’ – we parted company. Amazing how a description turns into an insult. Thus, it was
someone else’s turn to ‘sweep out into the night’. His night. I was sorry but, pique aside, I only
constructively regretted Lyndon’s departure in that the takings had started to rocket. One day I
note we took £200 one Saturday and £100 the next day, Sunday. For a while, that was the
pattern. Ever upward. I began to feel more at ease with my financial situation as the business
horizon levelled to one where I could accurately predict my weekly costs at £350, including the
comparatively huge expense of Lyndon’s wages.
Was it coincidence or the revenge of providence that as the echoes of Lyndon’s angry
frustration died away on the hillside, we first heard mention of the word ‘Recession’? Providence
is that goddess who, proverbially, detests being tempted. Gradually, rather like now in 2008, the
newspapers and television bulletins were full of gloomy economic news. It was as though the
good fairy had flown from Le Bol. Our business started to drop alarmingly. Recessions happen,
at street level, remarkably quickly. It is only the government, the higher media and the heavily
subsidised politicos of the chattering class who are the last to realise because they are the last to
feel the pinch.
My Façade
Stitched Up And In Situ
 The Chilling Landing Loo
As the public schools closed for the summer holidays, I also closed the afternoon tea
sessions. Why? Without the school kids there was simply nobody around to come in. The visitors
who came to walk the hills were bringing their own thermoses and sandwiches and walked past
my front door, curious as to the remarkable emptiness within rather than to what delights might
lurk on the menu. Recession is like someone has died.
Whether the following incident was ominous, I cannot say but one day, I was finishing a pee
in my first-floor bathroom when I leant forward and flushed the cistern only to be immediately
aware of an audible chink as something hit the porcelain of the lavatory pan. Before the rush of
water gurgled and rushed from around the rim, I saw that my diamond ear-stud, my wonderful
earring which Sharon Arden (now Osbourne) had given me had fallen from my ear and …
Well, before I could plunge my hand into the foaming maelstrom, the jewel had disappeared.
I called the plumber who drained the pan, disconnected the soil pipe but there was nothing to be
found. Such a wonderful gift and SO expensive! It was as though the security for my business,
nay my life, had been stolen by fate. I never told Sharon. I figured that by now she’d probably
forgotten she had ever made the gift. Ironically, thirty years later, she’s probably even forgotten
who I am. After my final, deep sigh, I comforted myself by recalling HAROLD AND MAUDE
and what Maude said to Harold when she threw the bracelet he had given her into the sea. “Now
I’ll always know where to find it,” she assures the distraught Harold.
 Chapter Twenty-Five

Here’s rosemary should you forget, boys

That cherries only flower in spring
But in those trees you’ll hear your love’s
voice
Through their leaves the wind’s words sing
Hurry home on whisp’ring wires
Hurry home on train and plane
Hurry home and light your fires
Hurry home and there remain.

My days at Le Bol always started in the same way. After walking down to Cridlan and
Walker at the Abbey Gateway where I ordered the meat for the day and maybe for some dishes
for the next from one of the lovely Leylands, I walked back up through the quiet, early-morning
town and started work in my kitchen. I worked with the window open even on the coldest days
and from the street, some feet below, no one could see me beavering away, preparing and
chopping.
Not seen, unacknowledged, I was at first outraged and shocked and then frightened by the
number of disparaging remarks I heard pivoting upon me and my restaurant which wafted up
through the open window. Although, as yet, I have never been physically assaulted because of
homophobia, I have certainly felt its sting and I can never forget the very real feeling of fear
which explodes silently like an alien incubus inside the guts. I never reacted to the taunts or the
expressions of disgust levelled at my character or my enterprise although I now, of course, wish I
had done. There were several occasions when, after the incidents I allude to, I wondered about
running away.
But, where would I have run to, in a country still beset with quite arcane cruelty akin to any
pogrom and persecution of obvious minorities which has existed down the ages? Thirty years
ago, ONLY thirty years ago, there was still little tolerance being displayed for those of us who
could be easily ‘fingered’. As an example of what I am illustrating, at the end of July, on my way
for a weekend break in Amsterdam, I witnessed the following at a public convenience on the
Oxford-London Road: “ … an appalling travesty at the Oxford loos. Three plain
clothes policemen had dragged two old men - and I mean old, each at seventy plus
– out of the loos and were in the process of taking them away in equally
plainclothes cars. How awful – one old man was sitting with his head in his
hands, bewildered shocked and stunned. I wanted to comfort him. I couldn’t
believe the police would do this – Why not just give the men a warning and send
them on their way? Such cruelty. Why wreck what is left of a frail human life
just because they have nothing better to do. Such an abuse of power, such little
use of integrity and judgement – Where is mercy on mornings such as this?”
I regard such victims as unsung martyrs. But one incident of prejudice does not mean that a
whole town is bigoted and it was obvious that not everyone hated me because, thanks to Malvern
College, I was making lots of new friends too. Really good friends, albeit so young. As well as
Alastair Carew Cox, Tim Hotham came more and more often. Jim Thornton, John Hoskins, Toby
Barnes, Julian Bailey, Chas Courtier, Brian Stapleton, Simon Wood and Ashley Major from the
in-house band FLAKS, Nigel Steel, Bruce Cochrane, Iqi (Iqbal) Shaik, Ben McKechnie and, a
little later but better than never, Larry Reade, the punk boy from Worcester. For the girls, Lucy
Rogers was a batter and a hitter. I liked her. There were Gaby and Emma Woofenden from St
James School, Robin Clarke from Ellerslie School and Sian from Malvern Girls College. And so
many more whose names I have forgotten but whose faces still inhabit my memories.
 Dais As Seen And Drawn By Sian
The reason I came to know this contemporary band of teen heroes was because they all came
to tea. Not that I invited them specifically but gradually, the restaurant filled up in the afternoons
with the sixth forms and truanting lower forms of the pupils of Malvern’s public schools of
which there was and had been for years an embarrass de richesses.
Why did they come to my place? Simple. There was nowhere else to go. Freedom, as James
Baldwin told us, is a notoriously difficult commodity to do much with when you access it. Sixth
form liberty to come and go from the school’s grounds was a relatively new phenomenon in the
private boarding school modus vivendi. All very well to be able to leave but with nowhere to go,
the leaving shakes down as a bit of a mockery. So, any port in a storm – they, these ‘kids’, found
me and my front door but what is more they found somewhere to smoke … My dining room was
also somewhere for the sap of passion to rise, somewhere for boy to meet girl and vice versa.
Maybe somewhere for boy to meet boy even?
The smoking thing was always a towering, spectral shibboleth in school life whether day or
boarding school life. It was such a monstrous crime and yet such a tempting rite of passage to be
a smoker. Expulsion was often the punishment and yet being included in the company of
smokers and being involved in the business of smoking devolved a certain kudos on those who
partook. Smoking was on a par with fornication and homosexual activity, bullying and stealing,
cheating at games and in examinations - all were punished equally. This Draconian attitude
seems odd now but then I don’t know what school policy in this politically correct age is towards
those who choose to smoke. At least now, there is more information available about smoking and
to smoke is more likely to be a choice rather than a perceived weakness in falling foul of ‘the
rules’.
Had I been the school authorities, other than re-scheduling smoking as a delinquent
misdemeanour rather than a capital crime, I would have felt that for the kids to have somewhere
to pursue such quotidian adolescent proclivities was better than them hanging around bus
shelters or settling down in the gorse on the grassy steep slopes of the Malvern Hills. To have the
latter sort of nest would, it seemed to me, encourage full-on sexual activity far sooner than daily
meetings in coffee bars although the loins are always more powerful than estimated. I learned
that children in the throes of sexual maturity find the lusting and the ‘fancying’ far more
attractive a turn-on than the act of carnal satisfaction. Pleasure gained from acts of sex only
comes with experience and age. Those first fumblings are usually rubbish as far as marks out of
ten are concerned, for boys just as much as for girls, however much ‘love’ they might perceive to
be involved. Physical relief is not necessarily pleasure.
The ‘am I attractive?’, ‘does she fancy me?’ questions are FAR more significant than the
‘we shagged again today’ menu of teen fare. As soon as teenage love gets physical, the quicker
that the door to promiscuity will open. But, hey … what did I know other than it was the spectre
of unwanted pregnancy which moralised sexual exploration.
I played music for my wards-in-disco, not merely background Elgar but the music of the day
that they liked. They began to bring their own records. I learned what little I was ever to know
about punk. In a few weeks I closed the room for tea to the general public and with the students’
agreement, held it open for them only and they chose their own music. Even brought it with
them. They didn’t let me down as far as their custom was concerned although the behaviour of
many of the girls left a lot to be desired – cigarette burns in my lovely new carpet was a no-no.
The boys were far more considerate with my facilities.
But in small towns there are a disproportionate number of small minds and word very soon
percolated through to the respective schools’ authorities and I started to hear rumours. Into the
ointment of all these wonderful new acquaintanceships, the fly had flown. Phil Heath told me
that Toby Barnes had told him of a grilling that he, Toby, had undergone at the hands of his
housemaster, a man called Knott. A grilling about me. Was I married, Toby was asked? Exactly
what had I done in this thing called ‘show business’? Oh, God … I hoped that it was a little too
early for me to be crucified just yet on the cross of someone else’s prejudices and ignorance. I
feel that although I shouldn’t have to say, I probably should set out that at no point and neither at
any time did I harbour sexual feelings for any of these young men or women. My tastes do not
run into that dangerous creek up which, therefore, I would never have been found with or
without a paddle.
By the end of that summer term, the writing was on the wall for my unofficial youth club
and so I circulated the following …
OPEN LETTER
Please read this and pass it on to anyone else from your school who has not
read it. The contents are information – they are not advice, a warning or a plea.
You are all mature enough to use the information as you see fit.
A little bird flew in today and told me that in Malvern College there is a
feeling that too many students sit around in public places smoking all day – This
knowledge appears to have aroused the latent, neo-Fascist feelings of some of the
teaching (I use that word reluctantly) with the result that it appears likely
that should anyone be ‘caught’ smoking in a public place, not only will the
‘offender’ be punished personally but than sanctions will be applied to the place
concerned, effectively removing access for the students. This is a sad threat –
most threats are in their nature sad. However, power is power however scantily
she may be clad in garments of responsibility.
For those of you who may be leaving this term, the threat is non-existent. For
those of you who are staying on as students here in Malvern, the effects of the
sanctions could be most irritating in the months to come.
Most of you know that I am in the process of converting the basement of this
house into a coffee bar to which you are more than welcome at any time. This will
be hidden from the street and access to stray ‘bombers’ will be made as uneasy as
possible. Flak, or even its plural derivative, can be thrown up.
As I said before, use this information only as you see fit – It might not be
too extreme a measure to be a little military about the situation for the next
few weeks. A few scouts could be posted. That, by the way is an observation, NOT
a suggestion,
Thank you for your custom
DAVID
Alastair Carew Cox was the first of this motley crew of students and pupils I came to know.
His photographs of the old hotel were the major part of the submission he made to Bourneville
College of Art for his foundation year and he was accepted unconditionally.
Dear Julian Bailey. Tutored more by Bill Denny than by Philip Heath at the College art
department, I felt Julian’s talent almost immediately. It was indeed tangible. There was an aura
about the young man which was un-missable. At the end of March, as I opened the restaurant, he
gave me – actually gave me – his painting which I call BLUE CLIFFS and which I still treasure.
“He (Julian) is a strange, wonderful and completely beautiful being. He radiates
love and the desire to be at one with his world … They (Julian, Tim Hotham,
Alastair Cox and Toby Barnes) are above all, individuals who stand out head and
shoulders above the crowd … A man’s art is only himself and the strength and
resolve and purpose in a man’s life is and can only be the one accurate
reflection that others will see in both the man and his art. The confidence to be
yourself is a difficult ambition. Achieving the ambition can often seem
impossible …”
Julian was due to have an exhibition at Malvern Public Library in 1980. His father Dudley
was - still is - a painter too, a good one, a member of a group of artists based in North Wales
called The Cambrian Group. I presume that Julian’s work benefited from this pedigree not only
in quality but also in quantity. Painters – if they are to be painters all their lives – paint. Or draw,
Or sketch. ‘Doing’ it is pre-requisite. Patrick Gale describes a painter’s psyche exquisitely in the
working of his character RACHEL in NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION. Julian couldn’t just
look at a subject; he had to record it, work it to his observation and perception. He was much
involved in landscape then and not only painted it but walked it, lay in it, sat on it, in front of and
behind it, beneath it and above it. I often met him when I too was out walking, often with one of
my ‘old ladies’ who I used to take out to tea at various hillside rest stops when time permitted.
Inevitably, Julian would stride past.
 The Blue Cliffs by Julian Bailey

Touting For Business

Julian inhabited his subject almost as a lover takes and possesses and devours the object of
his affection. Julian consumed life. Most people hardly taste it. Hence, this entry in my journal in
April: “I’ve bought three more Julian Baileys. One a café scene; one a wild
landscape centring on a church (rather Bronte-esque in colour and lonely
hopefulness);another, a peaceful landscape with yet another enormous sky with
that feeling of event in the freedom and light he creates in his distances and on
his horizons.”
After Julian’s exhibition at Malvern library, we had a party for him at the restaurant. He had
sold forty-two of the fifty paintings he showed and was somewhat elated after having been so
nervous. We were all so proud of him. His sister Belinda came up from London where she
worked at the Marlborough Gallery and Julian’s father Dudley came to stay for a couple of days
at the restaurant. What a joy to have him …
“Dudley’s a lovely man – vague and a bit bumbly – very much an ‘artist’. He
was a ‘captain of industry’ for twenty years and then gave up and turned to
paint. It was, presumably, at this juncture that he and his wife split up. He now
lives with Molly, in North Wales. He exhibits in Manchester but as yet has found
no great success in the London market. He and Julian are obviously very close. He
had a great expression – searching for our niche in eternity? A line that sums up
the great non-meaning from which all we seekers seem to suffer. A very spiritual
man who admitted to being very lonely; he’s the very stuff of art and artists.
Very like the vibes I often get from his son. The school was very impressed as
the exhibition, and our bibulous party, was graced by the presence of Mark
Carlisle, the Minister of Education and, happenstance, Jules’ god-father! I was
unashamedly satisfied as I counted on my fingers – Malvern College - one, Bol a
Tout Faire - two. And the winner is …”

Oil On Board by Julian Bailey

 Coast and Cliffs by Julian Bailey
But I was getting even deeper into the mire of me and ‘them’ - ‘them’ having been
commuted to a generic enemy - mainly because of Malvern College’s sixth form band, FLAKS.
It must have been Phil Heath who let my rock ‘n’ roll past out of the bag and the rest was mere
moths-to-flames psychology. I learned that Phil Heath’s tongue was as restless as his frustrated
libido and rampant creativity. His indiscretions concerning me and my past were ultimately
unhelpful. Or maybe it was me, my very presence which was so destabilising for so many people
in that small town?
But back to the band. They were so adorable, this four piece perching on the post-punk
fence, not sure, not committed but not averse to sipping the cup that had been known to runneth
over … They asked me to their first public gig one Saturday night in late April on the college’s
campus:
“ … another catharsis in the lives of these boys and girls I’m growing to love
more every day. The atmosphere in the College’s theatre was electric – Punked-up
boys and girls bopping about in ultra-heat, masters wandering around like
warders, picking up coke cans with wincing distaste as though each was a pile of
dog-shit, tapping embracing couples on the shoulder with the air of rank disgust,
seemingly contemptuous that a healthy pair of eighteen year olds should find each
other physically attractive. The band came on, all energy, charisma et cetera.
Totally disorganised, un-rehearsed. It was generally diabolical but … the kids
loved it … That’s basically all they’ll need … Now they have to start learning
about the reality of rock ‘n’ roll and not the illusion. No rooms for doubts and
fears about each other to eat away at the common confidence. Bryan (guitar and
vocals)and Simon (bass) will do well – I hope they come to love each other.
Ashley (guitar and vocals) sweeps a lot under the carpet and won’t face up to
stuff. Chas (drummer) knows he’s weak and may not be able to overcome the
pressure to give up and just have a good time. Simon is very upset. I worry for
him. He has just realised the enormity of the rock ‘n’ roll secret. Bryan is
quietly intelligent and has to galvanise against the emotional vagaries of the
others – he is the mouthpiece, the focus – it’s a natural position for him to
assume but a difficult role to play and one which the others will have to accept
or … Or they’ll just break up now, rather, of course, than when they’re hugely
successful in five years time.”
Golly, do I sound like Simon Cowell or what? My life was nothing like the X Factor. There
were no prizes. And, worse, it was entirely the wrong time for FLAKS to start their quest for
stardom …A-level time in their final year? Two weeks after that gig, Bryan and Simon had been
rusticated for two weeks and Chas Courtier had been gated. After ‘A’ levels were over, the band
re-started and Nigel Steel came on board as putative road manager, organiser. I offered them
accommodation for the summer vacation so that they could stay together rather than going to
their separate homes all over the country and to take their band one step further.
Nigel Steel was wonderfully intense and an excellent writer. Had the band held fast, he
would have probably written some great lyrics. He was to win the Poetry Prize at the College
that year and was assembling a book of excellent poems entitled ORGANISED THOUGHT
which he afforded to publish himself. Nigel’s family were from Worcester. A family of doctors.
His grandfather was in general practice as was Robin, his father. His mother was a health visitor
and his sister Helen was also to go to medical school. The whole family was a good customer of
mine. His grandfather and grandmother were especially warm and embracing, always keen on
any new dish that appeared on the menu, encouraging and supportive.
Malvern Hills by Julian Bailey
 Café Society by Julian Bailey
As I write, I am still amazed at the talent displayed by this group of young men thirty years
after these events. Their school recognised and encouraged this talent although in an
understandably blinkered framework, almost as a phenomenon removed from the souls of the
young men themselves. Sort of, yes, be a poet or a painter or a potter but do it in a construct of
conventional success in examinations and achieving university places; like, do it but have a
safety net. It’s kind of not the way … As Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire said in a recent film
to the character playing the parliamentarian and fledging liberal Charles James Fox when he
suggested allowing moderate freedom to some of the population, “But surely freedom is
freedom, Mister Fox? Like dead? You can’t be partly dead, can you and you can’t be moderately
free?”
I suppose, like always, the next generation just has to get on with it, to do it, whatever. But I
can now recognise that that’s a tough perspective for a professional teacher to pedal, I suppose,
or a thoroughly responsible parent. It’s way, way out of the comfort zone that as such schools
and families are supposed to bequeath their expensively educated pupils and children
respectively.
FLAKS did come and stay at the end of that summer to rehearse in the basement and by the
end of a week, the band had split up. Simon Wood went home to Ludlow, Ashley Major had
dropped out of play weeks before and they found themselves guitar-less, advertising for a
replacement but not knowing what they were looking for because they hadn’t known what (who)
they’d lost. So, brave dreams soon foundered. Good thing. Survival of the fittest and all that …
They did audition a promising replacement for Ashley. The recruit hailed from Pershore but at
the hour scheduled for the first rehearsal, there was no longer a band.
Alastair Carew Cox had decided he wasn’t going to College, as appointed. Who got blamed?
Me, of course, by his parents. But A-level results had come in and at least Tim Hotham had got
what he wanted, a foundation place at Hereford. He immediately made arrangements to stay with
me during that year and to commute to Hereford. With him as the focus, a little band of brothers
and sisters started to form as soon as that foundation year began. With no band to road manage,
Nigel Steel’s future was a little clearer and he stayed on in the sixth form. I sensed he was in a
turmoil about his private life but there’s only so far one can open a door without being first
invited in.
Someone who was only too immediate in his invitation was Ben McKechnie. Ben’s original
surname had been Wilson, changed to McKechnie when a wealthy Ledbury landowner married
and took on his new wife’s family. Mr McKechnie pere I never met, although I knew that it was
his money behind a competing Ledbury restaurant and a local Gloucestershire vineyard amongst
other projects he ran from his home at Brook End. He was good to his new wife’s two daughters
and son and all were being privately educated in schools in Malvern.
Of the three children, Ben was most known to me. He was a confused and frightened and
helpless teenager when I met him and, having obviously ‘heard about me’ on the resonant local
grape vine, he almost immediately ‘came out’ to me. Many readers will at this point, sigh and
think bored thoughts about ‘yet another gay coming out’ story. If you are thus inclined, please be
tolerant. It’s the single most formative event in a young gay man’s life and to be able to share
that moment with one who is completely sympathetic and not as puzzled and confused as you are
must be a great incentive and comfort.
I remember my own ‘coming out’. I wish I’d had a ‘me’ with me because I didn’t know how
my audience would receive the revelation. At least Ben knew I wouldn’t throw him out or reject
him out of hand and he got a great chance to ear-bash me. There were plenty of Kleenex and a
lot of hugs on tap. Coming out’s never just about ‘the gay thing’. There’s always a lot more in
the mix that needs to come out too. Ben had more than his fair share of ‘other’ in his closet. I
hope I never let him down. When he had left school and was ‘in London’, we used to meet
frequently in the clubs and bars and he got to know many of my friends. Freddie could never
remember his name and always called him Max as did Straker. Max he was in many departments
and I often heard news of him through friends of friends who were desperate to sample his
charms. Thank God, Ben and I never ‘did it’. Ever.
Ashley Major arrived back on the doorstep with Lucy Rogers. Ashley was a manipulator,
one of the most utterly selfish yet guileless people I have ever met. I rather envied his amorality
and said one day to Nigel Steel that I wouldn’t mind being like Ashley. Nigel Steel was almost
derisive in his disagreement. Lucy Rogers had been a student at St James’s girls school in West
Malvern and fell in with Ashley because … Because. Ashley displayed no regret or remorse
about the collapse of FLAKS but instead made up with Larry the local Punk and together they
started to lay their own plans for music industry world dominance.
Lucy, somewhat more practical, asked if they could move into my building and, in return,
offered to run the basement coffee bar for me when the autumn term began. I agreed. Ashley, I
don’t think, ever thanked either her or me. The thought just didn’t register on his ‘to do’ list. In
that way, he was more pure punk that he could ever have known. Lucy’s Disco Teas, as the event
was billed, were a huge success and never closed down even though my restaurant had long been
decreed ‘out of bounds’. Of course, to the young, the word ‘no’ invites irresistible disobedience
and the otherwise beautifully modulated pupil complement of the Malvern schools reacted
predictably, boy and girl. Ultimately, Rosalind Erskine’s THE PASSION FLOWER HOTEL
wasn’t even in it as the pupils (or do I say ‘students’ now?) inveigled themselves further and
further into my affections and certain rooms in the house were used for more than just looking
out at the view to spot an Ancient British Warrior on the crag.
“Could we sit upstairs, Dave?” was a request to which I frequently acquiesced knowing full
well that if a couple were so in extremis, better they explore their extremes in the warm and the
dry and not somewhere where they might dirty their clothes and REALLY frighten the horses of
nosey, unheralded passers-by! And, wouldn’t you know, such a subject as embraced by THE
PASSION FLOWER HOTEL was obviously deemed by its publishers as too dangerous to have
been written by a man. But by a man it was indeed written, Roger Longrigg, whose widow Jane,
herself an accomplished author, I later met on a cruise as DISCOVERY crossed the southern
Pacific.
The once Mrs Longrigg didn’t approve of me or my tales of teenage lust in respectable
Malvern and had obviously seen no need to read closer into, or at all between, the lines of her
husband’s most famous oeuvre. No further implications or nasty consequences at the Passion
Flower Hotel, then. I didn’t ask if he had gone to book signings dressed as Rosalind Erskine,
although I wondered. Maybe I should have asked? Or maybe she went in his place? No wonder
my own personal reputation in the eyes of those who should have been obeyed in Malvern
floundered in the bog at the foot of the first fence. I should have played my charade straight, or
changed my name, or better done myself up in drag and played it like MRS DOUBTFIRE or
TOOTSIE. Something pantomime which could have been seen, even if I was unfrocked, as just a
jolly good jape, something ‘acceptable’ that would never endangered the moral health of healthy
eighteen year olds.
Jim Thornton was an utter charmer as was the more diffident John Hoskins and they were
exceedingly kind and solicitous towards me later in this story. John’s parents were hoteliers and
were currently much involved with Bailiff’s Court, a fabulously eclectic and eccentric hotel
venture near Littlehampton and Bognor Regis, a facility which later was also to afford me a bit
of sanctuary.
Iqi Shaik was also an orphan of the storm. Slight and frail, I could feel Iqi’s soul, like you
can feel the rapidly beating heart of a sparrow if you hold it close in the palm of your hand. I
could feel his fear and I could taste his excitement and I knew when he had to stop himself. A
Muslim boy from Malaysia, he was also abandoned one vacation and came to stay with me at Le
Bol. I wish I could have helped him more than I feel I did but Iqi knew where his future lay and
knew that for him to venture too far from the stockade would be to make him a person his future
would be incapable of sustaining and he too would have become an early candidate for the
Paradise Walk. Muslim families see to that journey often in a more terminal and therefore
effective way than the modus operandi of marginally kinder cultures. I trust that life has been as
kind to Iqi as it could be. But secretly, I really hope he escaped his horrid culture and ran away to
Australia!
 It’s such an awful responsibility to have knowledge of so many people’s secrets and hopes
and dreams. I was in danger of over-love and of being over-burdened with fondness for too many
people. In those circumstances, it’s so, so easy to trip and when you’re down, it’s not only you
who fall, but ‘they’ do too. The last stages of innocence need a great deal of support, one-on-one
not me-on-twenty-five. I don’t think those Malvern schools realised just how much uncertainty,
unhappiness and frustration existed in their purlieu. Does any boarding school? I think it was
assumed that as such teenage phenomena were so unruly and uncontrollable, the institutions
would survive best if the lumps in the mix were at best ignored, at worst managed until the next
vacation when parents could take over and smooth out the texture. But, as I observed, most of the
parents assumed that the school was doing that job for them. Two stools can indeed form a
dangerous chasm into which anything unsecured falls. The one necessary option the schools
never took was to tackle whatever situation was ailing the kid and, objectively, try to create a
solution which was right for everyone, pupil, school and parents.
Alternatively, on the ‘down’ side of privilege, there was little Larry Reade, from Worcester.
Whether he had parents or not, I never found out. I deliberately didn’t want to find out but it was
plain that he was uncared for and there were probably very good reasons why. I retained at least
sufficient a sense of detachment not to want to be his surrogate father or in loco parentis in any
way. There was only one of Larry. He was the only punk who had emerged in Malvern and, with
his gel/glue-spiked bleached-blond hair, he looked like a jam-jar version of Mister Sting from
POLICE. I imagine Larry must have felt very isolated and of course I liked him – nay, admired
him – for being the only one, the one prepared to show, display and invite censure and reaction.
Now, in 2008, with the writing of the ROCKY HORROR SHOW book way behind me and safe
in whatever knowledge of punk which that experience brought me, I imagine Larry in Malvern
appeared not unlike Jordan did as she took that daily train up to London and the Kings Road
from Seaford, dressed as she used to dress in rubber, studs and chains.
Larry, more than any blazer’n’flannels College student, brought prurient attention to my
afternoon disco teas. That makes me sound rather like Patricia Routledge playing Hyacinth
Bucket in KEEPING UP APPEARANCES, no? The unrequested attention which fell due was to
ensure that steps were taken behind the scenes to force me to close my rendez-vous down. If
Larry was outrageous it followed that I must have been downright dangerous.
That I never discouraged anyone from coming in was merely my own sad effort to counter
the sort of authoritarian censure which leads to persecution. The British have a naïve belief that
their culture is one of acceptance and tolerance whereas, in fact, the opposite is more generally
the benchmark. I could never have asked Larry to bugger off even if not doing so meant the end
of Lucy’s Disco Teas.
On the other hand I sensed that Larry was heedless of my dilemma and had a don’t-care-if-I-
do curiosity about the Malvern College boys who, in turn, were far too cool to show that they too
had a curiosity about Larry. A couple of them, notably Ashley Major, given the opportunity
would not have merely wanted to LOOK like Larry in tartan bondage pants and spat-on leather
jacket but would have taken his attitude, mind-set and values even further away from the
conventional and expected.
But there was the rub. I discovered that my establishment, my vie boheme, could only exist
if everyone who entered its palisade contributed something. Such an idea was anathema to Larry
and certainly to Ashley Major and absolutely to punk philosophy in general. For both young
men, each in terms of background and life experience miles apart, their broken homes had started
them onto a common path which had led them inevitably to the same port of escape, then seen
them embark in a rudderless boat and it was only in someone else’s boat could they cross the
river. They would cajole, wheedle and manipulate to get into that boat but the prospect of either
paying for a ticket or taking a turn at the oars was alien.
I learned that they would take whatever they could glean, like living off the land, as long as
there was something to take but that thereafter, they would, like tinkers in the night, have quickly
disappeared. That whatever was offered to them was thus theirs to take was validation enough.
Fair enough, many would say. Nice work if you can get it, the song tells us … For a while I put
up with Larry and Ashley. I thought them perversely charming.
I often reflect that that’s how my parents saw me but then isn’t that how a lot of the world
works? Like the rhyme goes:
“Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em and little fleas have lesser fleas and
so, ad infinitum…”
I have to mention that not all the schools’ teachers were against me. Christina Gorst-Ellis
who was one of the house mistresses at Ellerslie School became a great friend and she was
hugely supportive of what was going on either in my dining room, my basement or even in one
of the rooms off the first floor landing although I don’t think she ever really cottoned on to
THAT. Christina came from a gentler place and a kinder time and gritty modern circumstances
decreed that she work because she had to but even the ‘got to’ factor in her life couldn’t sustain
too many terms at Ellerslie and she left. Like me, she returned to London where people often
think terrible people make unspeakable things happen to horrible people. To some, perhaps but
to most, the anonymity is balm.
 Chapter Twenty-Six

I’m so rich I don’t have to walk

I’m really far too bored to talk
My poor old brain can’t take the strain
I know – I’ll take some more cocaine …

I wrote the above few lines when I was working in John Reid’s office in 1976. Thank
heavens for small mercies, not the smallest being that I never liked drugs. At least I was never
found hovering over either the mirror or the crack in it … Lost and lonely I might have been but
I never saw a potential friend in the drug culture and never a saviour in any pill, potion or
potshare.
Surrounded by so much artistic creativity in what was fast becoming a sea of sparkling
hormones, is it any wonder that I was carried on and borne aloft on a tide of eager enthusiasm. I
think those rare months of 1980 were the last time I ever felt so buoyant and powerful and
thrustingly hopeful in my life. It was a sort of high, a natural one rather than one whipped up on
a cloud of white powder. Whether others in that charmed circle were doing drugs, I would
honestly not have had an inkling. If I thought think my gaydar was bad, my sniffer beagle always
has had a permanent cold.
Time did not allow me to write anything other than my journal. In hindsight, I should have
followed up on my first sale of a story to GAY TIMES with another, and then another. But, to
write, I have since realised that one has to have a nest and to have a very set routine into which
nothing else impinges for at least four hours a day. But, back then, I was arrogant and knew little,
if nothing. So, with the restaurant up-and-running, the staffing situation immediately organised,
my thoughts began being drawn to the idea of opening an art gallery too. Why not? Of course I
was running before I could walk but then … I’ve always disliked walking.
The walls of the restaurant dining room were covered with my framed and hung
needlepoints and, from my journal, I notice that over the period that the business was open, I
must have sold several of my works. Twenty pounds here, twenty-five there … It is indeed
encouraging but the sales and the compliments also gave me an idea above my station. Not only
above my station but through my wall where the upper floor of the electricity board was lying
empty. And available. The rent that I was offered was £1500 a year. My business was running at
a decent level of profit. I rarely went anywhere to spend money. What, ergo, was I to do with any
profit other than pay it to the government in tax if I didn’t spend it? Oh, I made it all sound so
easy. Galleries were blooming everywhere – there was the Ombersley one, a very interesting one
in Ledbury, Peter Dingley’s gallery in Stratford on Avon - arts ‘n’ crafts outlets were sprouting
everywhere as the middle class ladies of the shires came out of their kitchens and into the high
streets. It wasn’t exactly a band wagon onto which I wanted to climb. More like a carnival float.
Why and when and for what single reason the wind disappeared from the sails of my latest
folly I do not record although from my journal screams the observation that I realised that Phil
Heath would never exhibit with me. His sights had been raised and his expectations widened to
include a horizon which PRECLUDED anything to do with Malvern. I realised Phil was on his
way and that I was, once again, merely a stepping stone. I didn’t blame him for this drift that
took him away from me. We all do it as we all have had it happen to us.
But notwithstanding, the idea of the gallery above the Electricity Board sank because I
realised that I could use the restaurant dining room and, if necessary the whole house, as an
exhibition space for those who wanted it. Emlyn Dunn was one local artist who hung stuff on my
walls and gradually, the place started to acquire another reputation, one which probably did not
help its reputation as somewhere to eat. I should have known. Folks don’t like those with two
heads, those with two jobs. Brian Protheroe, singer/songwriter AND actor. I don’t think so. Tim
Curry, rock legend AND serious actor – not then. Not never, mate. To be allowed to wear two
hats is a privilege granted to very few. After all, to be known as a Jack of all Trades in ‘ordinary’
life is thought to be not quite respectable.
So, as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland used to say on Hollywood back lots, “Let’s put on
a show – Let’s put on a show right here!” And obedient to the prompt corner, at the end of
August, I did, the first being Toby Barnes’ pots. Jugs ‘n’ bowls. Here is the ‘blurb’.
“TOBY BARNES is seventeen and was educated first at Great Houghton Preparatory
School and subsequently at Malvern College. From association with the latter and
especially with Philip Heath his ceramics master, Toby has developed a love of
ceramics both wheel-thrown and sculptural, of which he is showing two examples,
both coil-built pots. These were made in a rough open-bodied stoneware with iron
oxide applied to the surfaces. The forms were fired to a temperature of 1280
degrees Centigrade.
The work on display has been thrown in the last month and is made from red, St
Thomas oxidising stoneware clay which has been fired to 1020 Centigrade and then
glazed with various recipes, some purchased and others which have been worked
through by experience. Toby’s favourite glaze is the delicate blue-violet seen on
both the bowls and the jugs. Much of the work has been applied with more than one
glaze to create the effect known as ‘bleeding’, which occurs when two glazes meet
and fuse.
The bowls are basically of two forms. One is the classic, slightly closed
shape and the other a more obvious, open form, closely associated with the
standard soup bowl. The jugs are adaptations of mediaeval pitcher forms with a
country-style glaze to emphasise the traditional nature of the pitcher form. Toby
hopes to carry on his love for pottery in all forms and is taking up a place at
Bristol Polytechnic in September.”
And here’s what happened:
… the opening was about thirty of us. We drank wine and ate beef risotto and
salads. Lovely evening. Toby was thrilled as Mick Casson, master potter, arrived
with his wife Sheila. Toby and he swapped bowls the next day as Toby was invited
over to Wobage Farm, Upton Bishop, where Casson masterpieces are apparently
scattered all over the farmyard, many with rainwater and old straw in them – Toby
was in heaven and the first step in his maturity has been achieved. He wrote me
the sweetest letter and I thank him for it.”
Pot by Toby Barnes
Melting Moment by Toby Barnes

Brain Boxes by Toby Barnes

 Balancing Act by Toby Barnes
My next outing as gallery owner was to exhibit the work of a lovely young Malvern girl who
was to attend Hereford foundation year with Tim Hotham, Claire ‘Wizzy’ Shawyer. Her interest
was in fabrics and using this platform she had created some vividly and cleverly, imaginatively
painted and collage work based on the theme of cocktails and their glasses and shakers.
“ … on Monday 29th September, we had Wizzy’s exhibition COCKTAILS AT EIGHT.
Very lovely evening. I served Buck’s Fizz and lots of little heart-shaped savoury
scones to about forty-five people. Everyone had dressed up according to the
invitation and looked superb. The room looked lovely and someone, a young Malvern
person, said it was all so good as nothing like it had happened in Malvern
before. Too right! That’s just what I’m all about – trying to raise a long-dead
sense of ‘happening’ in this town and its environs.”
To counter the monotonous effects of the longuers of non-happenings, London was still
calling. My friend Bryan Forbes had been busy rehearsing at the Old Vic with Peter O’Toole for
a production of HAMLET. Neither had worked in the theatre for quite a while … I went to the
first night of the limited run of a play which broke box office records for what many deemed the
wrongest reasons and I apologise to Bryan, should he ever read this, for this expression of my
feelings:
“Wednesday 10th September 1980 brought us MACBETH. The most confusing evening
in the theatre that I’ve ever spent. We all met at Elm Place and then Felicity
(Dean) and I drove to the Old Vic, a very tatty theatre now, hardly the fountain
of original and brilliant productions such as Zefferelli’s MUCH ADO ABOUT
NOTHING, ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN and EQUUS which I remember from the past. It’s a
place that gets rented out. Saw Jill Bennett, Jane Robertson, Roger Machell and
the ever-handsome Mister Sting, husband to Frances Tomelty who played Lady
Macbeth. Well, the production was a complete mystery … Peter O’Toole must be mad,
in the finest sense of the word – his performance was incomprehensible, over-the-
top in every way. From the excessive blood, the interminable pauses, the gauche,
limp stances and attitudes to the sheer monotony of the delivery of the lines,
O’Toole managed to murder not only the King of Scotland but also the poetry and
tragedy of a great play … Anyway, the result was that the critics in their turn
also murdered the play, caused a furore of media interest and the production sold
out for the rest of the run.”
If metropolitan theatre was luxuriating in over-sized egos, life in the decently maintained
provincial theatre was surviving and thriving in a very different way. Too many London theatre
owners and producers had been milking the facilities for far too long having put little back into
both the fabric and the philosophy of modern theatre respectively. Where were the comfortable
seats and the air-conditioning in the West End theatres in Shaftesbury Avenue? Where the new
exciting plays and shows? Discomfort was obviously the new glamour. As an antidote, one
Thursday in early October, I drove up from Malvern to Sheffield to see my dear Straker in THE
WIZ. I took Nigel Steel and another friend with me.
“The Crucible … such a lovely theatre, very modern but very well-designed
with good audience spaces outside and around the exceptionally well-proportioned
auditorium. There was a good exhibition of contemporary prints in the walls,
including one of Bianca Juarez’s works. In THE WIZ were also Les Saxon and Pearly
Gates, both very friendly. The show wasn’t that tight and there were patches of
awkward and incomplete direction by Peter James, the artistic director of the
theatre. However, Celina Duncan who played DOROTHY was very good and sang well.
Peter’s entrances and exits were superb and he managed a comic sequence posing as
a magician’s assistant with a convincing camp which although indulgent was both
relevant and well-thought out. We dined at an Italian restaurant after the show
where Peter behaved outrageously and I just hope that my little Nigel wasn’t too
shocked …”
Sadly, THE WIZ never came to London.
 Back in Malvern, the telephone rang. There’s still a great deal of glamour attached to a
‘phone call from Hollywood when the operator says: “Hello, this is Twentieth Century Fox
calling for Mister David Evans.” My dear Colin Higgins was coming to town. Was I free? You
betcha.
“I had last seen Colin three years ago but it was as though time had stood
still. We met in his room at The Hilton on Park Lane. He was tired, almost punch-
drunk after three years of almost constant writing, production, filming and
editing. He has just finished NINE ‘TIL FIVE (later released as NINE TO FIVE)
with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton and yet is also just about to start
on THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TOWN (later IN TEXAS), a new musical with Dolly
Parton and Burt Reynolds. Colin is one of the constant ones – he is still very
careful with money, still at a loss as to how to cope with his own career and
more especially with his love-life which seems to me to be pretty much in a mess.
His friend of four years, Larry Polk who ‘wants to write songs’, has done nothing
except play boy-wifey in the Higgins house and now occupies what is more or less
a sinecure in the Higgins production Company currently housed on the Twentieth
Century Fox lot. Colin wants him to move out of the Hutton Drive house but is
faced with the lonely prospect of returning to a re-vamped home which, in a state
of one, is relevant only to the past. He now feels that he should have sold the
house and moved to another one, a house for the future … He was so proud to see
me in his expensive hotel suite, so different to the deprived times we had shared
so long ago in London, Amsterdam, Paris and Los Angeles.”
But there was to be no long-term future for Colin. He stayed in that house on Hutton Drive
but all he added to it was a room to house his isolation tank in which he would immerse himself
in lightless limbo, floating on a body-temperature depth of water, getting used to what it might
be like to be dead.
1980 was surely the start of a new decade. If the seventies was the age of disco, the eighties
was to be the age of Aids. It was to be payback time like never before, one organised by Mother
Nature’s “Love a Virus” commission. After gay men’s hard-won fifteen years, (as opposed to
Warholian minutes), in the sun, the just-about-out gay world was to be visited by a curse so
malign that fear and terror was once again spread over lifescapes which, free of the older curse of
blackmail, had only just become used to a little acceptance, understanding and tolerance.
For long-suffering Africa, the curse was deeper and duller and became just one more
obstacle in the path of very survival, one more nail in the coffin of mere existence. Aids of
course was an acronym. I once read on a toilet door at Gatwick Airport the following
interpretation – A.I.D.S: Anally Injected Death Sentence. How gauche must the graffiti-artist
have been in his (it was the men’s washroom) homophobic exclamation. I rather think that in any
migrant community in southern Africa, which human orifice was used for the transmission of the
viral strain was and is entirely immaterial.
“But it was dark, m’lord. I couldn’t tell the difference.”
 Chapter Twenty-Seven

I helped a toad across the road

And then I helped him back again
A greater debt has not been owed
Since I cannot remember when …

Ah! Perhaps I should have kissed the toad. THAT’S where I went wrong!
Looking back, I realise that I was still looking to find love again. But for all the wrong
reasons and in all the wrong places at all the wrong times. I didn’t understand then that the more
you looked for anything, the less likely you are to find it and that maxim holds good for gold or
silver as well as love and happiness. It’s why my friends were still so important, new and old. I
had learned that friends should never be taken for granted and I learned that lesson because I
knew what it was like both to be taken for granted and to be forgotten.
Successively, my heart’s eye was pleasured by several, notably Nick Eastwood, a local lad
who worked in television in Birmingham at Pebble Mill doing something or the other but he was
as screwed up as I was and after a while of ‘will-he-won’t-he, maybe-not and never-me’, we
settled into being merely friendly and for a while he moved in to one of the rooms in the house as
a lodger.
There were several who moved in for a while as lodgers. After all, I had the rooms and
nothing else was going to happen to the space. There was a young man from up-the-hill called
Colin, I believe, who fell in with the comings and goings which were Le Bol a Tout Faire. He
was blond and thoughtful and obviously wanting to change something in his life. I watched him
as he assessed with a quiet intensity both boys and girls, men and women alike whom he met
under my roof. But he too, faded and dimmed and eventually dropped off the screen when the
going got tough and he realised that no one can merely exchange one life for another but that the
last has to be properly confronted and settled before the next can be embarked on; so much of the
last, willy-nilly, has to come too.
Both these young men as well as pretty, wilful Steve Everitt were, I now fancy, more
candidates for the avuncular side of my need to be involved. I knew in my harder heart that
should there have been any liaison, it would have been like taking a sugar pill to cure a cancer.
What ailed me, as I was beginning to discover as winter settled in, that year of 1980, was that the
whole Daisy-in-Malvern venture, supported as it was solely on the shoulders of moi, was
terminally flawed. On my own, by myself, in my current state of mind, there was no way either I
or, thus, Le Bol a Tout Faire was going to survive in Malvern. It was as though I had come to
live on an ice floe, drifting further away from the mainland and melting more and more by the
day.
My vulnerable connections to my mainland came in the form of visitors. Dear Sarah came a
couple of times, once with Maxine Taupin, Bernie Taupin’s wife. I liked Maxine who was
probably long-divorced from Bernie in 1980. She must have been because Bernie, Elton John’s
lyricist and muse, had been on the fast and loose in 1976 when I had arranged the book launch of
his collected lyrics. Two very nice people who should still have been together but … well, they
weren’t.
Sarah also came when she began to seriously develop the relationship that had sparked
between her and John Standing, an actor twenty-five years her senior, her mother’s, Nanette’s,
peer. But they had seemed to find what each needed and indeed are still together almost thirty
years later. I felt so ashamed at the quality of the beds in Le Bol that I went out and bought one
specially for them when they came to stay. It was a lovely big, firm bed and I used it for mine
own after they left.
Felicity Dean was a regular visitor and often stayed for a few days, or several weeks at a
time. Love always seemed to play her false in the sensitive years of her early twenties and she
became severely affected several times and successively involved with some fascinating men.
In addition to other help, finding a sort of sanctuary at Le Bol was always an option for Fliss
and I loved having her to stay. So did the boys, who yearned after her rather like a puppy holding
a loo roll aches for a mistress’s attention but compared to the calibre of her lovers at the time,
none of my boys matched up and none, thankfully, made any move on her. She was probably
only three years older than most of them but her very worldliness made provincial bumpkins of
them all. She arrived once with the actor and writer Bruce Robinson in tow. We enjoyed a lovely
weekend but their affair lasted such a short time. Bruce was on the rebound from a certain Lesley
Ann Down.
Suzanne Bertish and her then partner, the photographer Fatima, visited and had a happy time
and, infamously one weekend, Straker arrived with Kenny Everett. How those two outraged not
only the town but came on like the proverbial cat in my coop full of post-pubescent pigeons!
Kenny had decided that he wanted to have an affair with me and persisted in his suit even as we
walked through the nave and inspected the misericords of Malvern Priory Church. Right up until
the very last moments of his life when the Catholics were said to have reclaimed what they
obviously still regarded as their own, Kenny was religion-proof and the very mention of monks
and misericords and choir stalls and habits and tonsures sent his fertile imagination into
overdrive. He used to send me little notes which always ended with a joke;
Dear Daisy …
Q: What’s white and shoots across the sky?
A: The coming of the Lord,
love
Edith (His nickname).
That afternoon in Malvern Priory, those who witnessed his performance in the choir stalls
were privileged to see what was an entirely unscripted and sadly unrecorded episode of the
Kenny Everett Show which would have won awards. I miss that dear, dear man so much and
British comedy is short a nonpareil. The day ended when we all walked up to the top of the
Worcestershire Beacon, Kenny wildly groping at me in the dark and Straker, playing Miss
Whiplash, leading a certain College student, who seemed more than compliant, on the end of a
dog collar and leash. Talk about life imitating art …
My friends from Bristol were loyal and came frequently – Chrissie and Andy with whom I
have sadly long lost touch, Robert Cork and Shawn but most significant amongst the visitors
were those who said they would come and never did. Cherry Brown never saw my place and
neither did David Minns, my dear, dear Dil. I had offered David a partnership in the venture
when I had seen that there was a possibility of opening a business. I realise that we had drifted
apart at the time but I never properly understood why he did not take me up on my offer.
Whether he knew he had bigger fish to fry – sorry, no pun – at the time, I do not know but
what I know, now, was that he had always been and was to become a far, far better cook than I
was and that should his life have ever taken him into professional cooking, he would have
wanted an enterprise far more upscale than the one that I had planned and could afford. Any
partnership between us at the time would have soon soured and our relationship would have
ended up like mine with Lyndon Holloway, of my being accused of amateurism and being cheap.
Ouch. As it was, we were still together in 2007, almost thirty years later on the May morning I
waved him off in his taxi taking him to the airport to fly to Majorca, where he would die,
peacefully but far too prematurely, ten days later.

Dais and David Minns in Later Life

One sunny afternoon, there was a bright reunion. My childhood school friend Chris Hewitt
had returned from America to visit his mother and somehow she had learned that I had opened
Le Bol a Tout Faire. We manipulated Chris’s wheelchair up the steep gradient of St Ann’s Road,
up my front steps and into the dining room where Joan, his mother, left us for an all-too-brief
half-hour whilst she went to do some errands. For those who did not read APPOINTMENTS
WITH THE DREAM FAIRY, my first memoir or who skipped the introduction to this one,
Chris was born with osteogensis imperfecta and was physically, frankly, a bit of a mess.
But we muddled through school in a world without ramps and easy-open doors and him in a
wooden and cane-weave wheelchair that looked as though it might have come from any
Victorian novel where a sick child was featured. I couldn’t possibly count the times when he had
been in my arms, a flimsy collection of bird-like bones, as we negotiated the staircase leading to
the Geography room, his arms round my neck, giggling like two teenagers. What am I saying?
We WERE two teenagers!
Since those primitive yet halcyon times, life had moved on for wheelchairs and in the go-
faster, chrome version Chris had graduated from Birmingham University with an English degree
and moved to a mid-West university in the United States where he had secured a teaching post.
To have travelled so far with only the weakest arms and redundant legs is nothing short of a
miracle. A miracle of caring. The number of unsung people who enabled him must be legion.
Chris’s whole life is a testament to human kind. From the mid-West my wheelchair cowboy had
latterly moved to San Francisco.
That afternoon, we talked and mused and reminisced and it was one of those occasions on
which I look back with shame. I have before made reference to my imperfect gaydar. Well, that
afternoon it was not only imperfect but non-functioning. Only a few months before his death a
couple of years ago did Chris and I get back together again and only then did I realise that he too
was gay, an established poet and a great activist in gay causes on America’s West Coast. He had
bought one of my novels - A CAT IN THE TULIPS, I think - in that wonderful bookshop A
DIFFERENT LIGHT in San Francisco and had been spurred to contact me once again, sending
his latest collection of poems inscribed with a decidedly unsteady hand. Now it’s too late for us
to share what we had both striven for, a sane and respected outcome to a confused and afflicted
childhood. I do hope he hadn’t loved me way back when we were two schoolboys and that I
hadn’t noticed. Oh, dear God, assure me that he hadn’t, please!
 Chris Hewitt c.1961

After hearing of his death I wrote to our old school, Hanley Castle in Worcestershire to ask
whether they realised that Chris had died and to petition that at the next Founders Day, when
proud tales of heroic feats on the games field and great achievements in life after school are
recounted to the school’s credit, perhaps Chris’s own achievements could he high-lighted
because in my eyes, it was he who was the real hero alumnus. I was heard respectfully by an
outgoing headmaster and thus I photocopied Chris’s poems and sent them, along with my own
first memoir, for the library. I never had a reply and my donation was never acknowledged. I
even wonder if there is still a library. Paralympians there might be, duly accorded their fifteen
minutes of fame but this world will only make sense when there are para-people too, preferably
on prime-time television. Permanently.
Several deaths and very few entrances characterised the latter part of 1980. Robert Kidd, one
of the Royal Court Theatre’s most promising directors and one of Barry Krost’s partners with
Helen Montague in a theatrical production venture, died of a disease of the pancreas. He hadn’t
even begun to do his best work and left behind the lovely Jenny Sieff with whom, after a longish
liaison with Jane Asher, it seemed that he had found his personal happiness.
Later, in December, the magnificent Peter Collinson was reported dead at the age of forty.
He was the last of that flamboyant generation of British film directors, the director’s equivalent
of Oliver Reed. I once characterised his larger-than-life as one of ‘meetings and mattresses’ and
he will always be remembered for making the iconic – and the best version – film of THE
ITALIAN JOB. Lately, forty years after my first Austin Mini Cooper, I bought another. The
salesman had obviously heard of and knew intimately THE ITALIAN JOB but it wasn’t Peter’s
version and I was forced to realise that Peter has been widely forgotten. I had always hoped that
seeing me whizzing up and down Curzon Street in my little green and cream racing left-hand
drive Cooper with its exhaust sounding like a devil’s fart had given Peter an idea? Who
wouldn’t?
Marjorie McKee, our family friend who’d been stricken with a brain tumour, finally
surrendered. Like the earth’s tectonic plates, the generations were on the move again. I realise
now that my mother must have been greatly preoccupied with my grandmother to be able to
register Marjorie’s death or any other event of significance in our calendars. Granny Annie was
being embraced more and more by the ravages of dementia, whether the dementia was of
Alzheimer’s disease or not, I know not. But Annie would telephone in the middle of the night
and ask mother why it was still dark; she would telephone in the middle of the day and ask
whether she should turn off all the fires. My mother didn’t do illness – that’s not a criticism;
some people don’t. Can’t. Consequently, as my mother too was driven deeper into a raging
frustration and despair, relations with most of the family were collapsing. It wasn’t only me who
suffered the devastating effects of her ultimate weapon of choice, that of withdrawing affection.
My brother’s life had spiralled into that vortex of chaos because of his ‘manic depression’
and one could smell divorce like one mutely acknowledges the presence of the elephant in the
room. My sister came to Malvern only very occasionally, most often in 1980 with Kate
Anderson, but rarely if ever did she come up to see me at Le Bol. In fact, I was conscious of
being UN-visited. The good relationship which my sister and I now enjoy was to be a few years
yet in the emerging. Mother liked to control and in her own turmoil, she found it easier to keep
each of us penned in our corners as far away from each other as possible so that we didn’t
somehow conspire to undermine her position as Queen Bee.
As my core business slowed down towards the end of 1980 because of the recession,
mother’s only constructive comment was that I turn the place from being a restaurant into a
‘caff’ where bacon, egg and chips would be the order of the day. She had long since abandoned
helping me on the morning coffee shift. I think she thought that many more of her friends might
have come in although, with father’s and his friends’ opinions of what I was and what sort of
place I was therefore running circulating freely in the town, she can’t have been surprised that Le
Bol didn’t became the fashionable place for respectable ladies to enjoy a genteel morning coffee.
She had chosen her moment to make a scene and to flounce out and she took advantage of it.
It was another of those mysterious events in history, like my aforementioned quoting of The War
Of Jenkins’ Ear. This was The War of Fabric Napkins. Mother wanted to serve her dainty
morning fancies with a fabric napkin. I insisted she use paper. I didn’t want the extra washing
and ironing and she didn’t offer. No one won our conflict just as no one remembers why the War
of Jenkins’ Ear was ever fought and who won or lost. The eighteenth century still happened as
life continued at Le Bol a Tout Faire but a deafening silence was maintained from mother’s
corner for several weeks and her disapproval of the way she perceived that I was running my
business was palpable.
My father, as always, went along with my mother and acquiesced in whatever climate of
censure or approval she set. I always thought that their marriage was mis-matched and unhappy
although life was to prove to me that each of my parents was as incapable as the other of being
honest and open and direct with anyone, let alone with what one would have thought was the
most important thing in their lives, their children. Children were not for cherishing, they were for
controlling. I can never forget when on my twenty-first birthday my father said to me with no
qualification: “Well, you’re on your own now …” What it was that he meant to say, I cannot
fathom but surely, please, he didn’t mean that I was on my own?
“Oh,” I murmured numbly although I don’t think he picked up on my chagrin. Even if he
had done, he would never have said more by way of expiation. Maybe it’s mere co-incidence,
but in writing now, 2008, I realise that I have always lived my life as though I was on my own.
Children undergoing cognitive therapy at whatever age usually bring few rewards for their
parents and I confess that I am one of those children. I could wish that my therapy, undertaken in
2005 and 2006, might have happened whilst my parents were still alive so that we might have
been able to work ourselves out together but I have to concede that’s a wish on a list too far.
The experience of returning to Malvern and of my fated enterprise was utterly marred by my
having chosen to have recourse to borrowing money from ‘the family’ and from accepting the
‘help’ of the family business. Not only did my parents try to control us children emotionally but
also financially in ways which were so disparate that to find a rational thread of policy
connecting us all was impossible. To one they would give money for a deposit on a house; to
another they would lend at interest and to another they would merely give a house. To me they
arranged for money to be available at interest from a family fund in which legally I participated
equally with all members. To another, money was made available from the same fund but with
no interest conditions attached. To one they would make money available on the understanding
that the arrangement be kept secret from the others.
All this underhand - and presumed disguised - manoeuvring made for a minefield through
which one had to pick one’s way and provided a plentiful supply of triggers for rows and
arguments about other matters but which were then steered easily back to the subject of money
and, fundamentally, about how grateful each of us three siblings should be to the parents. To
compound the pitfall of my situation with my parents, my father had offered to do my books at
the outset of the business and I had agreed. Later, when it was made apparent that it was a way of
policing my affairs, I terminated the arrangement and organised that for a fee someone at our
family accountants should do my books. My father was incandescent with rage and, making what
was a bad situation much worse, was unrepentant. Terms seemed to be that it was incumbent on
both parents and child to hurt each other as much as possible.
As far as my relationship with my parents was concerned, one that had begun as damaged
goods was further poisoned to the extent that it would never be repaired. That I had my problems
and that they had theirs was unarguable. That there was never any common ground where either
side could act in a supportive way to the other was regrettable. That there was so little love and
trust around to save even a basic respect for each other was unforgivable. It is indeed an awful
conclusion for me to draw that to my parents, the most important concern was ‘the money’ not
‘the children’. The former forever obfuscated their behaviour and reaction towards us.
And, underlying it all, to be as fair as I can to my parents, Pat and Mary, I was, after all, over
thirty years old. And I had an ‘ology’, that ill-conceived ‘ology’, one that could have led me,
logically, into accountancy or the law. I must have been unfathomable. In my parents’ eyes, most
accountants had been accountants for years by this time! Even a doctor could have been a
consultant by now and as for lawyers … Didn’t they grow up to be well-respected politicians,
yet? But although unfathomable, surely can’t I have been in the slightest measure lovable too?
 Chapter Twenty-Eight

Have you not met? You must have done

The spectre of what might have been?
Out-grown, out-moded and out-run
This ragged wraith of once brave dreams?

I found that working the hours I did at Le Bol were only bearable when seasoned with as
many breaks as possible. Alastair Cox’s aunt Heather, together with her partner George Perry-
Smith, ran the Riverside Restaurant on Helford Creek in Cornwall and Alastair and I spent a
delightful couple of days there. We were taken to see THE JEW OF MALTA at the rain-swept
Minack Theatre before enjoying a picnic on the storm-lashed cliffs.
Talking with George and Heather over dinner the next day in their wonderful restaurant
dining room, it transpired that they had been keen bidders for Homewood Park when Ed had put
it up for sale. The world is surely a small place. One just has to travel a few miles from one’s
own front garden to discover that the big, wide world is all relative … And, yes. Homewood has
been sold to the Ross brother who owned Popjoy’s restaurant in Bath, brother of the other Ross
brother who owned the Cottage in the Wood Hotel here in Malvern Wells. Truly, a catering
dynasty.
I couldn’t help but enquire the price which Ed had achieved for the place. Something over
one hundred and sixty thousand, I was told and I thus reflected rather sourly on the tidy one
hundred thousand pound profit my hard work had helped to furnish. Needless to say, my heart
was overtaken by a deep sobriety on hearing this news. Homewood and its land had been a
revelation to me, a revelation about myself and not to have it available for further consultation
was disturbing. However, a trip to see Keith Barron and his wife Mary at their newly opened
restaurant FOXES at Hayle cheered me up a lot. Keith is one of those actors who, despite a lot of
‘darling’, is completely sincere. What you see is what you get and what you got was priceless.
Simple.
Trips to Amsterdam seem to have occurred a couple of times during that long summer and
autumn. From reading my journal – I have decided to spare readers the ‘sq’ bits as Jackie Jesse
would call them – it is perfectly obvious that I was hell-bound on the same profligate avalanche
of sexual event which killed so many in the early nineteen-eighties. I stayed at the Hotel Orfeo
and the experience prompted me to muse on the possibility of changing the nature of Le Bol into
one of a hotel restaurant and keeping it exclusively for a gay clientele, advertising in the
magazines which were beginning to publish my stories. I had the rooms but … But, indeed.
What scotched the idea was that I didn’t have the bathrooms and that to have the bathrooms, I
would lose the bedrooms. So. No dice in pioneering the UK’s gay hotel business.
I wrote assiduously whilst I was in the Netherlands; half of the writing consists of long,
purple passages describing Amsterdam life as I saw it passing by from the cafes and restaurants
and bars in which I spent my time. It’s really boring. The other half’s so incredibly raunchy that
although it’s not pretty reading, it displays the person who emerges from the pages as such a sad,
empty shell of a man. Freedom, indeed, can be an impossible commodity to do with safely. If
there is any substance to theories of self-destruction, I would have made a perfect subject at that
time.
I returned to Malvern from these trips only to find business even more gloomy than when I
left. On Wednesday 15th October, I wrote: “ … taken only £21 so far this week. There’s
nothing I can do about the customers. The ones who come in really enjoy the food.
The ones who don’t wouldn’t anyway and, apart from settling for a hamburgers-and-
chips menu, this is the cheapest kind of food I can produce. I have no reserves
and am entirely dependent on cash-flow. I wonder how long I could hold out after
the overdraft exceeds the £6000 which is the uppermost limit to which I would
dare go.”
That particular week’s takings amounted to £267, a gross which was entirely attributable to
the power of Art. A crowd of people including Julian Bailey’s father Dudley, booked themselves
in for dinner after Julian, and his peer Justin Mazjub, put on a small exhibition at Malvern
College in which Julian’s painting of Le Bol A Tout Faire was exhibited and which, I note,
someone called Mark Hardiman wanted to buy. Why it was not I who bought it, I have no idea
other than that I was painfully cash-strapped. But even then I don’t understand - it appears that
however afraid of money I was, the fear had never stopped me from spending excessively before.
Occasionally, chance brought into the restaurant some who became short-stay guests who
paid for their room and board. One of my needlepoints was bought by one such, a young and
rather attractive Australian who had come to Malvern to pay homage at a local grail site known
as the Morgan Motor Car Works. He said the needlepoint was a present for his wife. I knew it
wasn’t and surely, real men don’t buy other men’s work to have made into cushions, do they? I
could have understood the purchase and the rationale if he had said that my work would
ultimately cover his new car’s handbook – or some such, but … He was in and out of my life for
a couple of days as he visited the Morgan works, worshipping at the cylinder head. He was
entirely affable, enjoyed his breakfasts and dinners and when we repaired to bed each night, I
would lie in my room and he in his, adjoining and he, as I, never closed our doors. For the first
night, after closing off the light and seeing the light in his room being extinguished too, I lay
there, awake, waiting for his nocturnal visit. The second night, I lay there again, waiting, more
insistently than before but he never came. I wonder what happened to my needlepoint?
By mid-November, business had deteriorated so much that I had been forced to let Carol
Amos go. She had been my rock and I felt awful dismissing her but she, dear soul, told me not to
be so silly and that she could get more work than she could shake a stick at in any of the homes
for the elderly from which she had come to me. And she told me she wouldn’t have missed the
experience of Le Bol for all the world. I was left more than humbled by this noble and
redoubtable woman.
By the end of November, I was opening only on weekends and I noted that takings for the
two days, Saturday and Sunday, covered the reduced expenses for the whole week. Was this the
future? My business experience had consisted of a series of lurches into constant downsizing.
However, my journal records that with so much extra time on my hands, I spent more money …
And now I didn’t need them any more as allies, more gays than I thought could ever have
lived in Malvern were coming out of the woodwork. Philip Heath was becoming more than
involved with one couple and was venturing dangerously close to leading what was that classic
double-life which always ends in tears and worse. Each time I ventured into the Red Lion next
door, there seemed to be yet another air steward on a night off and that inevitable exchange of
‘knowing’ looks. And those were just the ‘out’ gays. Still in the closet were several men who
half-acknowledged me as we passed on Church Street but who, being school teachers, saved
their passions and proclivities for the holidays. All, sadly still smacked of that certain Morgan
Foster-ish helplessness.
Straker had just released the latest of his Freddie Mercury-produced albums and, according
to the perceived rock’n’roll wisdom of the day, was touring the contents around the country.
Straker’s show was, after all, the active result of the handover of responsibility I had engineered
from my management to Freddie’s ‘camp’ four years earlier. I, sort of, still had an interest. Now,
someone called Colin Bell was being paid £150 a week to ‘manage’ Peter although the man
seemed more devoted to lap-dogging Freddie than promoting Peter.
I drove up to Sheffield with Nigel Steel, Nick Eastwood and his brother Andy. The latter
was a wonderful decorator of ceramics although the recession had lately seen off the company he
worked for, Royal Well Porcelain. The show we saw was nothing to do with rock’n’roll but
merely an extension of Peter’s over-the-top and old-hat camperama which was wincingly out-of-
place in that half-empty, provincial theatre. I had warned Freddie at the time that Peter just
wasn’t rock’n’roll material. I hate being proved right but no one was admitting to anything that
night. Only Peter’s own downbeat behaviour lent my doubts a peculiar validity. I was incredibly
depressed by the event. It was an object lesson in the chaos theory of career management.
 Collaborating – Straker and Freddie
In the dressing room afterwards, there was champagne of course, buckets of the stuff, but
there were no other bubbles. Peter was decidedly non-effervescent although the rest of us took
over and fizzed appropriately. Freddie was delightful, entirely unchanged and rock-solid. I
hadn’t seen him for a couple of months and certainly hadn’t met his latest ‘squeeze’, a French
Canadian called Gilles who, it was later told me, had been dispatched as quickly as he had
arrived. Kenny Everett was there with Annie Challis. Paul Northcott, John Reid’s partner, was
there with David Croker from Rocket Records, now Peter’s record company and Sally Atkins
and Laura Beggs from the Reid/Rocket press department.
It was a rather down-beat journey back to Malvern. The others went to sleep in the car and I
drove on, ever on … I can’t recall whether it was that night or another but as I approached the
Malvern Hills, I saw an incredibly bright light whose source appeared to be sitting on top of the
hills, somewhere about the Worcestershire Beacon. As I looked, the light source seemed to rise
in the sky and then withdraw into the deepest distance with incredible speed until it disappeared.
Was I merely imagining what I had seen or was it really a vision of my old life finally
imploding? Or was it my Ancient Briton, my warrior vision, on a moonlight visit from another
side of time?
I saw Freddie more often later that year than in more recent months. One night, after we’d
had dinner at SHEZAM with Joe Fanelli and June Bolan and her boyfriend Graham, we went on
to dance and cruise in HEAVEN where Paul Gambaccini was playing pool and marking his own
‘coming out’. We then went on to LEGENDS where Freddie and I sat together and he explained
that although Joe Fanelli had re-appeared in his life, it wasn’t in any way that filled any
emotional gaps and that he was feeling incredibly lonely.
I felt so, so sorry for him. I now realise the significance of his rootlessness. He had always
longed to know the future, his future. In the days at Homewood, Freddie had arrived once for the
day just after I had been given a copy of the I CHING by Peter Wood and I was high on
consulting it and interpreting the conclusions after the lengthy process of throwing a pile of
sticks onto a flat surface and gradually removing one at a time until a point of moment arrived.
As I have already recounted, he dismissed the book’s finding although had still accepted a copy
of the book I had bought him as well as the necessary sticks culled from Homewood’s hedges
and branches, all wrapped up in a white, Chinese silk scarf and contained in a special wooden
box I had found. I often wondered if he had ever opened the box again.
However much his mask might disguise, at that time the expression on Freddie’s face
beneath is almost that of the agonised regret of a pierrot, one of Philip Heath’s immaculate but
voodoo dolls. I shared my own feelings with Freddie that night and I think that neither of us had
ever been closer than on that evening. I felt, like Pierrot, that I had fallen from something, from
somewhere and that I would never, never be able to get back to it. It’s a horrid feeling knowing
that there is nothing you can do to help your friend and vice versa. It’s rather desperate and
frighteningly empty.
Mary Austin was faring no better. Although she had been cast adrift on her ocean, she was
still afloat in Freddie’s boat. At Elm Place one evening, Sarah and I cooked supper for her, Rory
Faber and John Dodds and later went over to finish the evening drinking at John Standing’s flat
in Burlington Lodge at the far end of Fulham Road. Mary told me “… haven’t had such a
nice evening for two years.” It was to be a long time before her children and, in an odd way,
Freddie’s death was to restore her to her own life although that life seemed destined to see her
living in another’s shadow and at another’s behest. Freddie may have been a thin man but his
shadow eclipsed whole landscapes.
Freddie was beginning that period of his life during which I was to see him less and less as
he began to live in New York and then in Munich. He was drifting from bar to bar in the
company of Joe Fanelli and always accompanied by his driver Peter Jones. It seemed at that time
that the glue which had held many of us together at the beginning of our association was
beginning to lose its bond, that we were all being spun in a complex centrifuge to the outer
perimeters of our world and that our special gravity was no longer having any effect.
Freddie and I had long passed that point where we needed to live in each other’s pockets.
Whenever we met, at least we always met as equals, there being no competition or obligation
between us. Even at my lowest ebb, it had never occurred to me to ask my friend for help, either
financial or occupational. Funny – had I been so reduced to ask, I know he would have given that
help unconditionally but I realise now that he also knew that I would never ask and that’s
probably why I now understand a little better why our friendship survived to his death and why I
was the only one, other than his employed household and associates, to be present to weep at his
funeral. I like to think we trusted each other for we had no other reason to remain friends.
 Chapter Twenty-Nine

Still safety-pinned, the hem has stretched;

My darns alone save warp and weft
From shearing, running like a mesh
Of time unravelled, nothing’s left …

As December dawned, even the enforced policy of ‘weekends only’ opening was no longer
an option. One Saturday in mid-December no one came in to eat at all. And it had suddenly
become very cold. Inside the house, the hard-won central heating didn’t do anything much
outside the restaurant dining room and the atmosphere was even colder than the ghost-haunted
first floor landing when the phantom tweenie was about. Like the phlogiston in the theory of
burning held by the Greeks, I could no longer deny that the spirit had flown Le Bol a Tout Faire.
I shut the doors, hung up the ‘closed’ sign, planning to re-open after Christmas, sometime.
Sometime in 1981. That ‘some time’ never came.
I took in lodgers. Tim Hotham’s stint at Hereford during his foundation year as well as Nigel
Steel wanting to move in, furnished me with sufficient paying guests to cover the heating, water
and local council rates as well as the swingeing monthly interest payments made to my exacting
trust-masters. But each time I returned to the house, the mess was indescribable. Washing up not
done, post lying in a splatter on the hall floor, hall and stairs uncleaned. The guys buckled down
after one of Daisy’s rollickings but it was not a joy to have the house so occupied.
According to my journal, I spent less and less time in Malvern. As Christmas with my
family was never discussed, I spent it at Seven Pines with the Forbes family and we had a lovely
time. Bryan’s sister Betty and her husband and family came for Christmas Day and on Boxing
Day. It must have been a lovely sight for Betty to come into the kitchen to find Nanette on her
knees in front of me … The turkey tin had tipped and hot fat had flowed all over my trousers.
“Honestly, Betty, she was only cleaning it off!” Evie and Leslie Bricusse and Michael and
Shakira Caine arrived for lunch. It was the age of the domestic video camera and the one Bryan
had bought was put to good use in making some wonderful home movies which, if they exist
still, would surely be collectors’ items.
Back in Malvern for New Year’s Eve, Felicity Dean and I walked to the top of the Malvern
Hills and surveyed the coming year of 1981. It is hard to put into words one’s feelings sitting up
there in the centre of a huge, magnificent silence, sensing being a part of a comforting logical
unity of earth, sky, distance, light and air.
 Judi Maynard and Felicity Dean
Suddenly the cares of ‘down there’ were put into perspective for a few brave and consoling
minutes. I was helplessly reminded of Edward Elgar’s reported words to a friend just before his
death that in the event of the friend being alone on Malvern Hills and hearing sounds for which
he could not account, “ … don’t worry,” the great man is supposed to have said, “it’s only me.”
Alas, those few brave minutes came to an end for both Fliss and I as we began our descent of the
bare, winter hill. Felicity’s thoughts were her own. Mine were all mine as we walked back down
Happy Valley and into St Anne’s Road.
The final pulling-in of my financial horns had taken the form of selling the beautiful
scarlet/orange and black Triumph Dolomite Sprint which I had bought earlier in the summer
when the workaday white mini van reminded too much of the past. It was a foolish, indulgent
and extravagant silliness and I lost money of course on the too-quick resale but instead bought a
little standard mini. That too would be sold by the beginning of April 1981, losing even more
money. I can’t now even remember what the car looked like. There was no prospect of the
trading climate improving, no wave to catch to surf back to a shore which instead was receding,
daily, faster than ever I could have swum.
I had saved some tip money for a really rainy day and I decided that I would wait no longer
for rainier days and on a whim, telephoned Colin Higgins in Los Angeles and asked if I could
some and stay. It was one of very few occasions that I have ever thrown myself upon a friend’s
forbearance although I shouldn’t have worried. Colin told me to come immediately and so on
Friday 10th January, I flew the Laker Skytrain to Los Angeles. Freddie Laker’s brave dream was
about to hit the buffers too. There were so few people on the flight. I had four seats to myself to
stretch out and sleep away the six thousand miles. How the airline made money, I couldn’t say.
Of course, the answer is that, “it didn’t”.
I took a very expensive taxi from LAX into that sprawl which pretends it’s a city, to the
address at 2644 Green Valley Road, up in the Hollywood Hills. It was a house which Colin had
bought to live in whilst his own on Hutton Drive was being re-modelled, the work on this
occasion being done by other carpenters than Harrison Ford whose ten year old work was being
ripped out to make way for new. Mister Ford had gone on to bigger things. So had Colin. His
latest movie, ‘bigger and better than’, was NINE TO FIVE which was in its release week. We
went to see it at the Egyptian Theatre with Tom Miller and Bob Bayer, Colin’s producers and I
was thrilled for Colin at the palpable success which the film oozed. Colin had secured another
contractual first in that he as the director producer also shared in the vast royalties which Dolly
Parton’s song was generating and would continue to generate for decades to come.
Bryan and Nanette and Emma were staying in Los Angeles and Colin was eager to meet a
fellow film director and wondered if I might make arrangements? I suggested making dinner one
night. Colin was aghast. He had never had a dinner party in any of his houses ever. So, break a
duck, I encouraged and indeed he did so. I cooked up an edible dinner and, with Colin’s ‘beard’
and best friend Barbara Sammeth, we all had a lovely evening, swapping tales and stories and
gossip and the Forbes got on very well with this up-and-coming force in film. His next project
was to become THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS, also starring Dolly Parton and
to that end, we went to watch as many musicals as possible. It was in those days before the
immediate availability of DVDs. That technology and the graft of transferring all those many
movies onto the new media was still years ahead. One afternoon, therefore, we went to a
screening of three musicals back-to-back at the Varsity Theatre in downtown Los Angeles,
YOLANDE AND THE THIEF with Fred Astaire, THE HARVEY GIRLS with Judy Garland,
Cyd Charisse and a wonderfully young Angela Lansbury and thirdly SILK STOCKINGS with
Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.
Los Angeles is a tremendously conservative place. I’m sure that Colin had to play the game
as far as not being too ‘out ’n’ proud’ is concerned. Image and front and show were, and are still,
the names of the game and anything which frightens the horses was frowned on. Being frowned
on can often mean the first step to excommunication and in Hollywood, excommunication has
both temporal and spiritual consequences and both are financial slide areas. How Barry Krost
managed, I shall never know although being fundamentally a music business operative has some
advantages.
Thus, even the appearance of the few punks we saw one day at the junction of Crescent
Heights and Santa Monica Boulevard caused an outcry and when Colin suggested going out to a
bar and I donned my leather jacket and striped black and red jeans, he was so taken aback that he
asked me to change into something less noticeable. Stranger and stranger, I thought. Colin’s idea
of going to bars, sadly, took the form of going to places where he could pick up rent boys. Since
the departure of Larry Polk from his life - Larry was to return - Colin’s new-found wealth was
buying him a helluva lot of ‘rent’. The bars where such assignations were made were
‘respectable’. Hippie or biker or punk men-tarts were not on the menu in the pick-up joints that
skulked behind the discreet neon marquees on and off Sunset. Where one went for that menu of
speciality dishes, I never discovered but ROGUES seemed to suit Colin’s purse and penchant. It
was where everyone wanted to be … you got it! An actor.
I would also hazard a fairly intuitive guess that it was in these bars and from those boys that
Colin encountered the virus that was to kill him, seven years later in 1988. Colin was not one for
the anonymous, mindless sex which was to be had in back rooms and bath houses from
unidentifiable shadows. He was one for the anonymous, mindless sex obtainable much more
expensively in sleaze bars from smiling rent-boys. I notice from my journal that my own sexual
success in the cheap-trash trough of the bars and bath-houses that I frequented on this visit was
depressingly sparse but then, perhaps I should be grateful for being so side-lined by Californian
manhood. Perhaps I escaped by the skin of my teeth that particular first swathe of death.
My finances were not holding up well and my visit lasted only a week. On the morning of
my departure to London, Colin had left to go to the studio office and I took a telephone call for
him. “Of course I’ll leave a message …” It was Sheri Lansing, the head of Twentieth Century
Fox studios with the news that NINE TO FIVE was the Number One film across the nation. On
the same day it was announced that the American hostages being held in Iran were to be freed.
Well, I thought to myself as I drove my rental car back to the airport, if that’s the effect I
have on America, maybe I should visit more often? That very conversation had taken place at
breakfast that morning when Colin intimated that there was absolutely no need for me to go
back. Nothing specific but I knew he would have employed me had I asked. But he didn’t offer
and I didn’t ask and now we shall never know. Had he offered and had I stayed, I sure would’ve
been deader than dead by nineteen eighty-five. Probably earlier. That first flush of the Human
Immune Virus was unsparingly efficient. So, I said goodbye to my wonderful friend, thinking of
him visiting Burt Reynolds that night to talk about ‘the part’.
It was not the last time Colin and I were to meet. Thrice more our paths would cross, once
when I and he-who-is-yet-nameless stayed with him again, once when he came to London with
Shirley MacLaine and finally when we visited him in his hospital bed at St John’s Hospital Santa
Monica when he was all but helpless a few weeks before he died.
Back in London I started writing another book and I had another call from Colin asking me
to go to Harrods and see what I thought of a Shakespeare First Folio he had been told was being
offered for sale. I went and duly reported that it was only a part-folio. I don’t think he bought it
but it was thanks to this wonderful faraway friend that at least I got to touch one of the precious
pages. I seem to recall how inexpensive it was. For what it was. Had I been Colin, I think I
would have bought it and waited ‘til a complete volume came up for sale on the basis of better
something today than nothing, ever.
 Chapter Thirty

… “Find the joy, dear,” he would often

say to me
When I was all out of love and my black dog
barked.
I would protest, the victim squirmed:
“I’ve tried. I’ve tried!”
“Then just try harder, dear,” he’d say. “For
god’s sake, find the joy, dear boy.”

With so much time on my hands, I really did start to write. “Write about what you know”, I
had always been advised. So I wrote about wanting to open a restaurant. You’ve read bits of it
here. Not that writing it kept me off the streets but it was something to do and at least I achieved
another ambition, that of writing another full-length book rather than another short story.
My novel A SHADOW ON THE GREEN was still going the rounds of the publishers
thanks to Sara Randall. But it never found a home. It was turned down successively, but in no
particular order, by Orbis, Quartet, Michael Joseph, Jonathan Cape and the restaurant book,
when it was finished, met the same fate. Graham Tarrant had moved from his own company, Gee
Whizzard, to Heineman but he/they didn’t want my book. My old gopher from John Reid days,
John Brown who was then at Eel Pie Publishing, didn’t want it. Oh, they were all very nice but
…
It was rather dispiriting. When I worked in the music business, if we couldn’t find a home
for someone or some project, we would usually refer them on to someone else if we thought the
talent and/or the work was good enough on the proverbial basis that one man’s poison is
another’s meat. For the next several years, nine to be precise, I would have to content myself
with the occasional short story appearing in one of the Millivres publications. Police raids on
bookshops selling ‘gay’ material were commonplace and those of us who wrote under the ‘gay’
banner were proscribed from writing anything that could be considered sexually gratuitous. Such
constraints were more than irritating especially when we saw the literary rise and rise not only of
the bodice ripper but of the panting orgasm – the heterosexual variety of course.
I had rented my dining room space at Le Bol a Tout Faire to Jean Preece, a Malvern antiques
dealer, so lovingly supported by her husband John. At the time she moved in, Jean noticed some
surface furrowing in the tongue-and-groove woodwork covering the walls. I asked my father to
go and have a look at it and after inserting a penknife into the wood as easily as one would stick
a pin into butter, it was pronounced that my place had dry rot. How it had not been noticed a year
earlier, I know not. I am not an expert. Sadly, my father was supposed to have been. So, I had to
let Jean have the place rent free whilst the offending and potentially disastrous condition was
corrected. Mess, muddle and more mayhem than a boy needed. Jean’s former and latter rent,
however, paid the rates and the interest on the Trust loan and although I was left penniless, I was
left merely able not to sink with what had become a millstone dragging me down.
I will always be particularly grateful to Bryan and Nanette Forbes at this time. I was able to
stay either with them at Seven Pines or in London at Elm Place whilst Sarah continued the
progress of what was now a fully fledged relationship with John Standing. His work in
SHADOW PLAY at The Kings Head had brought him more attention and he was enjoying
constant film work such as his appearance in THE ELEPHANT MAN, a film which affected us
all deeply.
Emma Forbes, still at Hurst Lodge School, was zipping about the town, taking part in the
English Speaking Union’s activities which encouraged public speaking in the young and
auditioning for the London School of Classical Dance in Golders Green. She finally found
acceptance at the Urdang School of Ballet although sadly, she never achieved her burning
ambition to be a dancer. However, her hard work and perseverance, despite some really bad luck
and physical accident, paid off in the end when later she had her break on the BBC children’s
television Saturday morning show LIVE AND KICKING. But all that was a ways off yet.
 Emma Forbes, Dais and Nanette Newman
I was incredibly flattered to be asked by Bryan and Nanette whether I would agree to being
Emma’s joint guardian in the case of their joint demise. Of course, I acquiesced. It would have
been the least I could have done for them in the face of the hurricane of kindness and generosity
that they had heaped on me. My co-guardian would have been Sheila Attenborough, once Sheila
Sim, Lord Dickie’s wife. Golly, am I glad I never had to fulfil my word and step up to what
would have proved a very empty plate?
I saw a lot of Kenny Everett around this time. He had just met a really nice, solid young
Australian by the name of John Pitt and they seemed very happily ensconced in a roomy ground
floor flat in Dawson Place in Notting Hill, only a stone’s throw from the flat that his now ex-wife
Lee had taken with her man, the actor John Aukin.
In Kenny’s flat there was a full studio recording desk where he made the musical
interruptions that he played as part of his Capital Radio show. He took great pains to make his
work perfect, layering the harmonies on the little asides with which he peppered his broadcasts.
He was incredibly shy without the buttress of alcohol and seemed to crave support. His eyes
often assumed that puppy-like melancholy that begs for a master’s attention. The tendency to
submission was to lead him into very dangerous waters, ones that, I believe, were ultimately to
kill him when his later affair with the romantic, macho Russian Nikolai burst upon both him and
much of London’s gay panorama. But, just as the nursery rhyme recounted the mindset of the
Grand Old Duke of York, “when he was up he was up, and when he was down he was down, and
when he was only halfway up he was neither up nor down …”, Kenny always seemed to live at
either of the extremes, often both simultaneously.
As had Bryan Forbes, as well as anyone who could afford one, Kenny had just bought
himself one of the newly available video cameras and he was using it to explore some of his
visual ideas on his own without the aid of the BBC and Barry Cryer’s writing army. It was at
about this time that Freddie Mercury bought the property in Logan Place which he would
eventually turn into the magnificence that became his treasured Garden Lodge. The day after
contracts were exchanged, Freddie took a group of his friends round the empty property, friends
including Kenny with his video camera. Somewhere in Kenny’s effects, despite the later
unpleasantness which developed between him and Freddie, there must have existed a home
movie where Peter Straker gave his ‘Marguerite’ to my ‘Armand’ and in which Freddie and Joe
and John Pitt and others were a cast of Parisian thousands in an epic played out in Freddie’s
azalea garden. No one took any notice of me when I protested that an azalea was an azalea and a
camellia was a camellia although belles dames there were a-plenty in the walled garden that day!
Where I found the money to gad about London’s clubs and bars I have no idea but it seems
that with one friend or group of friends, I was in HEAVEN or at LEGENDS or in Earls Court at
the COPACABANA most evenings. Dancing in the nightclub HEAVEN during that disco era
was for me one of those epiphanies in the same way that seeing the Madison danced by two
thousand gay men at Studio One in Los Angeles was a few years before. It was an exhilarating
sense of freedom that flooded the huge dance floor as well as the other nooks and crannies
beneath those rambling, rumbling brick-vaulted railway arches at Charing Cross. It was SO new
to us and SO empowering.
With Kenny and Straker one evening, I was introduced to Jack Tinker, the diminutive drama
critic of THE DAILY MAIL who performed like some manic ego-dog, spilling the beans of his
life with little integrity and no dignity. Why is it that so many gay men who lived a married,
heterosexual life for the first four decades of their lives ‘convert’ into such embarrassingly over-
the-top gays? But his generosity was a quality I have to record for he gave me the telephone
number of his partner, the publisher Adrian Morris at Octopus who indeed proved both kind and
helpful.
At the end of March, Straker landed the part of The Duke in Shakespeare’s MEASURE FOR
MEASURE for the National Theatre. The reason? Well, he was black and Michael Rudman had
been commissioned to field an all-black cast in the production which was to play a while in the
New Theatre in Hull and I gladly drove him and Stefan Kalifa and Angela Bruce northwards.
Very impressive production which I hoped would help him progress. His recording deal with
Freddie’s production company which thence fed him into Rocket Records seemed to have
ground to a halt. Maybe more and more people who HAD to be on his side for the project to
work were figuring that Straker wasn’t the rock singer they thought he might be. Or maybe they
figured that the name of Mercury was not always going to be tagged on to the Straker career.
The third album of Straker’s contract was ultimately cancelled and the distribution deal with
Reid and Rocket dribbled to a dry end. On the one hand, it wasn’t a particularly honourable
conclusion to the tempting carrot of life that Freddie had offered Peter five years before, but on
the other … hey, a job’s a job. Freddie was beginning to spend too much time away from
England to be able to properly work with Peter.
Though I would have been delighted to have seen Peter’s success soar like Freddie’s had
done, I’m not sure that Freddie would have been able to manage a life which revolved around
TWO star personalities. He was having difficulty coping with one, his own. And Peter and
Freddie had always been intensely competitive. Their relationship always suffered from a basic
imbalance – as friends, they were equals; as performers, their status and success in their own
world didn’t match and was never in ‘synch’. Peter felt it when Freddie was too Freddie Mercury
and drifted just that little bit too far away and he often reacted accordingly. They often squabbled
and quarrelled like combative school-yard best friends.
By the end of March 1981, the situation in Malvern was desperate and I realised that I had
no option but to put Le Bol a Tout Faire on the market and consulted the estate agents who had
sold it to me, Whitt Yeats and Ridley, accordingly. My journal records that almost immediately
they received an offer of £40,000 for the property but on their advice, even in such a punitive
economic climate, I decided to hold off. That I did so proved to be an immediately costly
decision as I was to spend the next twelve months living penuriously, fearful of borrowing any
more money and raising my overdraft even higher. Whether my declining the original offer was
the right decision or not, I leave for others to judge. But, although I didn’t know it, the way that
my life was ultimately to turn out was just dandy. But that point was a long way over the
lowering horizon.
On Sunday 12th April I stopped writing my journals and didn’t start again for a full year.
Life was just about to get really tough.
 Chapter Thirty-One

Don’t believe that death has no sting,

Shun those who tell you that graves are
losers;
There is no sodding ten-to-three,
No lovely healing English honey
For tea. Just days,
Days like uneatable cakes,
Filled with self-pity,
Iced with fucking sympathy.

The last few lines of the unabashedly cheerful SO YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO OPEN A
RESTAURANT goes like this:
“ … So, now you’re ready to open. It’s the night before and everything is ready as it will
ever be. Have a drink and an early night. In fact, have a big drink and a very early night.
My first session was a lunchtime. The menu included a special chicken pie made with leeks
beneath the meat, a chicken supreme in the middle and golden baked mashed potato as a crust.
There was also a dish of highly seasoned Italian meatballs in a rather too heavy garlic and
tomato sauce with wholemeal noodles.
I opened the door at half-past-twelve and in came, along with her seventy-four year old son,
a sprightly lady of ninety three. My heart sank – There’d be nothing she’d like, I knew it!
How wrong. She ordered the meatballs, polished off the lot and had a brandy to wash it
down.
Thankyou, Nellie Whitley. You were my first customer.”

I can prove that Nellie Whitley had been Le Bol’s first customer. I have her signature.
History, however, does not record who had been my last customer. Whilst victory is trumpeted,
defeats are infrequently commemorated although in Argentina, one might think that the
Falklands War had had an entirely opposite outcome.
When Le Bol a Tout Faire opened Bryan and Nanette had given me a beautiful leather and
gold book to become my ‘Visitors Book’. There are too few entries and for some forgotten
reason, evidence that I had torn out a whole sheaf of pages in what I might intuit could have been
a rage. I’ve always been rubbish with visitors books, even the one I’ve got now, a present from
my mother, a blandly respectable one culled from the phenomenon of THE COUNTRY DIARY
OF AN EDWARDIAN LADY. I think the last entry was in 1993. I always forget to ask people
to sign them.
Even though I had been assured that I could imminently expect another, higher offer on my
property which would have seen me back in funds, I’d signed-on at the Social Security office in
Graham Road. ‘Signing-on’ means registering that you are unemployed yet free for work but
claiming relief. Throwing yourself on the mercy of the state. My grandfather would’ve turned in
his grave had he known, for in his day to have so publicly admitted your penury would have put
you one step away from the workhouse door. But I had no feelings of shame whatsoever. As far
as I was concerned, I’d paid the tax and now unable to pay the tax, the tax was going to pay me.
As it would turn out, signing-on provided me with a safety net for which I would be more than
grateful.
So, off to London it was again, with high hopes fully substantiated by encouraging remarks
from the estate agents about a potential sale of Le Bol. And on this basis, I had to work very hard
emptying Le Bol a Tout Faire of furniture and artefacts and sending what could be realised
profitably to the local saleroom and giving away, or redistributing the rest, mostly in the two
store rooms above my father’s office in Newtown Road. That I still have Julian Bailey’s
paintings is testament to their being thus warehoused until times improved.
My only regret was that I left a very important mould behind. Maybe it was significant.
Maybe I should have even broken the mould, the mould in question being one which my friend
Tim Hotham had created to produce the bowls which I wanted to characterise Le Bol a Tout
Faire. He also made me several tea pots, marvellously capacious with spouts that never dripped.
His bowls were handsomely slip-moulded, wide, deep dishes with a goodly lip for plum stones
and choky bits. When the slip bowls were fired, then glazed and decorated and fired again they
came out looking as though they had been made in the tenth century. I had a theory that, using
bread as a cleaner, only one bowl was really necessary to eat one of my three course meals. The
theory remains commercially untested.
 Tim Hotham’s Perfect Bowl
Tim only ever made six prototypes. I broke one. I still have five. They are very precious to
me. Whatever happened to the mould, I know not and in my mind’s eye, I can still see it lying
where I left it. Whether, ultimately, it was actually broken is immaterial. Broken it was. So many
of life’s memories are illusory. Places, houses one has known in the past, green fields over which
one has romped are so real in one’s mind even though we cannot but acknowledge that they have
long been bull-dozed.
But, on the brighter side, at last I had a destination in London which wasn’t the spare bed at
Elm Place. Sarah and John Standing were now an item and she had moved in to his superb
apartment in Burlington Lodge in Fulham. Elm Place was going to be rented until such time as
Emma started at ballet school when she would take over with Deborah Moore, Roger Moore’s
daughter, as her ‘lodger’.
Kenny and John Pitt had met one of their neighbours in Dawson Place, an antiques and art
appraiser by the name of David Clark and David took in lodgers in his cream stucco semi-
detached villa. I had been circumstantially persuaded into selling the Mini which had replaced
the zippy Triumph Dolomite and so it was in a rented Ford ‘van blonk’ that I drove up to London
with the few possessions I was left. David had agreed that I was able to rent the room
unfurnished, hence my being accompanied by my great, big bed, the one bought for £50 when
Sarah and Standing came to stay.
In Dawson Place, down a flight of steps from my top floor room beneath the house’s eaves
was a first floor landing kitchen of which I was permitted use. The tiny bathroom adjoined that.
David was a sort of push-me pull-you landlord. He wanted my society when he chose but when
he didn’t choose, he was quite capable of making me feel specifically excluded. Fair enough. I
thought him arrogant and manipulative and in fact rather cruel although I made sure I kept up the
best relations with him. He proved to be a tortured soul, deeply insecure and socially vulnerable
when not wearing the cloak of wealth.
I forget what rent I was paying but after only a short while, with no word of hope from the
estate agents in Malvern, I realised that I had to find some useful employment. Strangely,
without my family to rail against or a livid, failed love affair to blame, I felt more lonely than
ever in that room in David Clark’s elegantly furnished villa. Like a governess or a tutor in a
Victorian household, useful during the day when I was allowed the run of the lower rooms, alone
and marooned at night when my presence was not required, when ‘company’ came to call and I
lay on my great bed, watching my tiny, faithful white plastic Pye television and hearing the
tinkle of ice in gin glasses and gales of gay laughter floating up from downstairs.
Most evenings, I would cross the road and have a drink with Kenny and John, often with
Straker and others. Inevitably, we would all gather round Kenny’s studio desk and he would
dragoon us into singing the multi-part harmonies which he would then manipulate and synthesise
into what we would hear later that day or the next over the radio airwaves. But such fun, all
washed down with lots of wine and accompanied by peals of laughter. Oases of happiness in a
desert of few recognisable features.
Unlike the lovers which Freddie found, John Pitt was never going to make ‘kept boy’ status.
He had always been au fait with restaurants and waiting tables and was in the process of
negotiating a franchise to run the café-bar at The Westside, a gym in Kensington High Street
with his friend Phil. Embarrassingly, I have forgotten Phil’s surname. They needed someone else
to complete the personnel roster, someone who could cook, serve, add up and who was
trustworthy to run the place alone when they each took leave. And that’s what I started doing,
initially for what amounted to three days a week.
 Sarah (Forbes) Standing and Felicity Dean
But there were still high and happy moments. One day, Sarah and I accompanied Felicity
Dean to the Barbican Theatre for one of her many auditions with the Royal Shakespeare
Company. It happened to be the morning when the news had been announced from Buckingham
Palace to the world of the engagement of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer. We had waited
for Felicity and, after her audition was over, we drove back across London in my little white
minivan to Elm Place where Sarah lived. As we crossed Sloane Street and were driving down
Pont Street, a Ford Granada estate car with a chrome jumping horse ornament on its bonnet
drove past. It was a car that I recognized, a car I had seen before, in a magazine, taking a royal to
a polo match, or something.
 And there she was. Diana. The then Diana Spencer was in the back of the car, quite alone,
obviously being driven from her Coleherne Court flat in Earls Court to Buckingham Palace to
face her music. I yelled to the girls to hold tight and somehow turned the car around and roared
in pursuit.
We caught up with the Ford Granada at the Sloane Street lights and we wound down our
window and all yelled our congratulations and ‘Good Lucks’. We weren’t in a presence. She
hadn’t had time to become a presence. Then, she was just a girl getting engaged to a prince.
Diana looked up, startled at first, then, realizing we meant no harm, broke into an embarrassed
grin and waved back, heartily, as excited as we were. Having given our good wishes, we let her
go and whilst the Granada drove straight ahead to Buckingham Palace, we turned right into
Sloane Street and back home to lunch. Unlike us, she didn’t drive away; she couldn’t. She was
driven away, out of our ordinary lives, out of her ordinary life and away to her destiny. Hers was
already a life out of her control Even I had more control over mine.
With extra time on my hands, when I mentioned my need for a matching extra income to
Lee Everett, she suggested that I become a cleaner, a domestic and that she would gladly be my
first client. The money she suggested was more than reasonable. Lee was a generous-hearted
woman, capable of great love. She knew show-biz inside out, having been previously involved
with the British rock singer Billy Fury and then, Kenny. I never knew if she married Kenny
knowing he was gay but instinct tells me she must have done. But their separation was of the
kindest and they continued to care deeply for each other even though both had entered later
relationships. She was deeply ‘spiritual’, felt she could, with otherworldly help, foretell our
future paths and help people to happier states of mind via mystical methods and auras and spirits.
John Aukin, the handsome blond actor who was to become her third and final partner, was a
delight and they let me get on with what I did rather well. Cleaning house.
And thus, I became part of the black economy. My wages were all paid in cash and I
therefore cheated the state each fortnight when I went to ‘sign on’. I had transferred my social
security account to Hammersmith and was assiduous in making each appointment. I know what
those guys felt like in that queue featured in the film THE FULL MONTY. I’ve been there.
I spent almost nine months in this vein. I picked up other clients for whom I cleaned
regularly – Jonathan Altaras the theatrical and film agent and Joyce Gallie the celebrated casting
director amongst them. I was quite surprised at the amount of money I was able to earn, certainly
enough to keep up with my fine and fancy friends when we stepped out onto the town and more
than enough for fares up and down to Hampstead Heath, which became a place of great solace to
me as well as a fertile source of sexual partners. Its moonlight spaces and cloud-scudded skies
were on rainless nights a delight to wander, season through season, accompanied by the
swooping call of owls, the screech of roosting peacocks in the neighbouring park and the
ubiquitous rustling in the undergrowth, often a sign of a hunting pussycat rather than anything
approaching human. It all reminded me of how feral life is only just beyond the palisade. And it
reminded me, perilously, of the wild at Homewood.
As well as at the Westside gym, I started work in Richard Branson’s Townhouse Studios on
Goldhawk Road in Shepherds Bush, pressing fruit juices and making quiche and salad for heavy
metal rockers. I just missed making anything for Freddie and Queen. There’s a wonderful story
in THE AFTERLIFE which Peter Freestone, Freddie’s assistant and chef, recounted: “My good
friend Martha Brett reminded me of this incident the other evening. Queen were
recording at Townhouse Studios in Shepherds Bush when Freddie arrived one day and
rather imperiously announced: “I would like some water melon juice …” Martha who
ran the catering interests of the studio, always tried to accommodate any
artist’s requirements but water melon is really not a stock larder ingredient.
The tape operator, John Brough, was duly dispatched to source a water melon. His
destination was originally Harrods although he stopped at every shop along the
way where he thought he could find water melon. He discovered one in Notting Hill
Gate and quickly brought his prize back to Martha who found that her juicer
wasn’t working. She then proceeded to pass the cubed watermelon through a sieve.
It took forever. Eventually Freddie got his water melon juice in a tall glass,
with ice and an accompanying cocktail umbrella of course.”
Oh, the moments I’ve been spared! Rather Martha than me.
And so I waited. For my ship to come in. For my investment to pay off. For my gamble to be
vindicated. For my perfect hand of cards. For my future … This proved not to be in David
Clark’s house. I had always known that he and I could not possibly live beneath the same roof
for too long. When Kenny and John Pitt split up and Kenny moved to a house Ravenscourt Road
at the end of the Goldhawk Road, an opportunity to move in the same direction came up. Felicity
Dean had worked on a Granada television play that summer called THE MEMBER FOR
CHELSEA with Richard Johnson, Eleanor David and Judi Maynard and it was the latter who
announced that she had a room for rent in her house in Westville Road and … And so I moved
in. I sold my great big bed to David Clark for what I had paid for it and took my other bits ’n’
pieces by hook or by crook to Judi’s. Part of the arrangement was that I would look after the
house for her whilst she went to Australia for three months.
Without the stabilising influence of John Pitt, Kenny’s life lurched into a gear which took
him at a speed he really couldn’t – and shouldn’t have had to – handle. Nikolai’s tastes were very
specialised and when married with Kenny’s inclination towards humiliation and degradation,
produced situations which were far from physically healthy. I can never forget Kenny driving
past me as I walked along Notting Hill Gate one weekend lunchtime. I had a date and much to
my shame, I didn’t immediately eschew it after Kenny had stopped the car. He looked distressed
and, indeed he was. In reply to my concern, he explained that, after a heavy and lengthy session
with Nikolai the night before, he was bleeding.
He asked me what he should do and I recommended that he telephone either Gordon
Atkinson – Freddie’s doctor whom he knew – or Peter Collier at 21 Devonshire Place. Both
would have locums on their telephone answering services and even though it was Sunday, I felt
sure that Kenny would have been able to see one or other. I understood that it would have been
difficult for him to have gone to a hospital. Having made sure he had the right numbers to call on
his up-to-the-minute car telephone, he assured me he would be all right and he drove off.
I stood at the edge of the pavement watching his car disappear. I should have gone with him,
wherever and cursed the said Nikolai for his heartless negligence. And my date was nothing
special. Just more sex. That moment on Notting Hill Gate made me realise just how much we
gay boys were defined by sex, had been defined by sex. It was as though we had to have it as
often as we could just to make sure we were still ourselves.
Another Christmas approached. I had not been encouraged by my family to think of
returning to Malvern for the holiday. There were too many open wounds on the body of my folie
de grandeur which just wouldn’t die … Anyway, down and depressed, the thought of stoking up
the fires of enthusiasm to join in someone else’s Christmas or even to arrange for a makeshift
event of my own making at Judi’s house was anathema. Would I have opted not to go to
Amsterdam had some invitation, disguised as a knight in shining armour on a white charger,
come along to rescue me from seasonal exile? If I wanted to be Garbo-esquely alone, going to
Amsterdam seemed a mite terminal but I booked the short flight. Then, my contrary voices told
me almost at the last moment not to go, to cancel but I was unable to do so and left for the
Netherlands on Christmas Eve. I didn’t feel well on the way, but arrived at the by-then-familiar
Hotel Orfeo where Ben McKechnie was also staying, nursing a similar lack of desire to return to
Ledbury to spend Christmas with a similarly malfunctioning family.
It wasn’t destined to be much of a Christmas. It probably wasn’t even for my family back in
Malvern. With me or without me, they must have felt the hole in their net. The dear octopus was
missing a tentacle. I felt not being with them acutely but patched up the rent with a familiar darn
of pride.
Simply put, on Christmas Day, far-away in 1981, I collapsed with an illness later to be
diagnosed as Hepatitis A. Helpless, otherwise alone and almost delirious, I was encouraged and
supported back to Schipol airport and onto the plane to London by Ben McKechnie without
whom, I …
I don’t know how to credit this act of supreme concern and kindness because Ben is now
dead. I think of him every day, this gloriously great big boy with the corn-yellow hair who strode
away from the Malvern Hills with so much hope in his brave heart in 1981 and so much love to
find. It was not love he was to find but sex, lots of it. Love and Ben always fell out, inevitably.
He wrote about his feelings with savage intensity and collected these writings into a sheaf of
poetry. I wish I knew where these pages were now. I would publish them, put them towards what
needs to be further written and learned about the plight of those who yearn merely to be heard
and supported with embracing love through their dilemmas, not shunned and ignored as
inconvenient nuisances.
My current sufferings that Christmas were as nought compared to those which Ben was to
undergo horribly during his short life into which Aids rampaged virulently and which was
subsequently further blighted by drugs, alcohol and an horrific fire in the back of a police van
which ensured that the poor boy’s hands were so badly damaged after a series of amputations
and skin grafts. Amazingly, buoyed up by a cocktail of retro-viral drugs and at last supported by
Hackney Social Services, Ben emerged not only from the dilemmas and confusions that life had
wound round him but from his very real wounds and disease a happier person than I had ever
seen. That he died alone in an East London Hospital, unidentified for several days is an
indictment …
But who to blame? No one, of course but surely, no one should have become so ill as to die
unattended when there were family and friends to at least gather round his bed? Yet, maybe, just
maybe, that was how he wanted it to be. Certainly, his was not a vengeful soul and he achieved
his ultimate triumph over adversity and in death turned his life into a victory. God speed, you
great boy.
How I struggled back to Judi Maynard’s house from the airport, I know not. I could think of
no one to call and pride was binding my hands regarding my family. Judi’s cat was being fed in
my absence by Judi’s friend Gillie and somehow I got myself, I don’t remember how or if indeed
Gillie helped me, to what was Hammersmith Hospital where my blood was tested, I was
diagnosed and merely sent home. Nothing was done for me whatsoever although I concede that
nothing medical can be done in such circumstances of hepatitis and that to take up a hospital bed
would have been wasteful. But how I yearned for someone to gather me up and minister to me.
I managed to call Peter Collier, a general practitioner in private practice whom my friends
and I had come to know and whose rooms were at 21 Devonshire Place. We have all had reason
to be grateful to Peter over the years and amongst my ill-luck, it seems that I was also blessed
with kind hearts that Christmas. Peter has one of the kindest hearts and he came to my side. He
took blood. He had it analysed and he tended to me ‘though there was nothing medically that
could be done for me. The tests showed that my liver function, whose normal count would have
been between zero and twenty-seven, stood at fifteen hundred.
Peter drew the curtains in my room to give me darkness and the curtains would not be
opened again for four long, wintry weeks. He told me not to worry as my body became jaundiced
and turned a dull ochre-yellow. He helped me into a mind-set where I denied myself all fatty
foods and all alcohol, not a drop of the latter passing my lips for a year. My urine matched the
colour to which the whites of my ‘baby boy blues’ had turned. I was just about capable of
preparing porridge and I drank orange juice. It was cold in the house but, being in bed, I thought
I didn’t need heating. Fears of having no money haunted me. A swirling miasma of nightmare
wove its way through my wake-sleep-piss, sleep-wake-piss routine. The arrival of the DHSS
cheque saved me and the visitors who at last began to arrive – Felicity Dean, Jim Thornton and
John Hoskins, Ben McKechnie who came as soon as he returned from Amsterdam – were able to
help me cash them. Or these marvellous souls loaned me and ‘subbed’ me ‘til I was able to repay
them … I have forgotten so much and thus owe more.
And so the days passed. The only memory I have from those four weeks is of being unable
one evening to deny myself any longer, admitting defeat as the fabric of my darned pride
snapped. I telephoned my parents.
I was choked with emotion and could hardly speak, managing a voice little louder than a
whisper as I explained about my illness. My mother listened but with no evident sympathy and
she made no offer to come and help me, no suggestion of bringing me to their house to recover. I
put the ‘phone down, realising that I was, as my father had long before so succinctly and
inappropriately told me, well and truly on my own. I had been effectively abandoned. Yet, I
didn’t feel vindictive or angry. I just felt incredibly low. And puzzled.
I crawled on my hands and knees from where the upstairs telephone was connected in Judi’s
room back to my bed. It took me a time to make that short journey. I can still feel the rough
carpet against my cheek as I lay on the landing for a while beneath the quilt I had dragged with
me from my bed and wept.
From that moment, I started to get well. Although hope had run out, sheer bloody-minded
determination seemed to take over. It was my Eliza Doolitle moment – “Just you wait, ‘Enry
‘Iggins, Just you wait …”
 Chapter Thirty-Two

Do we depend, mere fortune’s slaves

On how milady luck behaves?
Or is our master Destiny
Who dictates how our lives will be?

My illness was not, ultimately, bad enough to kill me but cruel enough to allow me a very
long time in bed, long enough to plan for my survival in a perspective that consisted of
featureless parallel lines. Thus, I looked down at the road, not ahead. At least it was a safe
dalliance with the future. Nothing significant reared over the dull prospect of tomorrow.
I note from my journal on January 28th 1982 that a year had elapsed and I had written
nothing. So, on that date, I started again and recorded that Doctor Peter had come again to take
more blood and to warn me that on no account must I expect to be ANYTHING like recovered
until at least the end of February. My last set of ‘bloods’ had revealed that after four weeks, my
liver function count had reduced to a more acceptable sixty-seven. Still forty notches downwards
to go ‘til the magical upper end of normal at twenty-seven arrived. I learned that the liver is one
of the few organs of the human body – skin being another – that can reconstitute itself.
Something special indeed puts the ‘live’ back into ‘liver’.
Meanwhile, life went on around me, rather other people’s lives did. Felicity was torn
between wanting a part in GOOD with Alan Howard or to go to Stratford-on-Avon for a season
with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hers rather put my own set of choices into the shade
because as to what I was going to do when and if I am recovered and where I am to live were
two imponderables. I watched Quentin Crisp on the television who opined, on a matter of dress:
“To dress after your own style is like issuing a manifesto. To dress after
fashion is like signing a petition …” Thank you, Quentin but I needed more than a quip
to get through my current predicament. In the end, Felicity opted for GOOD which took her to
Broadway for the first time a couple of years later. At one point we had been toying with taking a
cottage in Stratford together, for the season. What we were going to use for money, I have no
idea.
Judi Maynard, my landlady, was all this time away in Australia. Each week I was so mindful
of not disappointing her that despite my parlous state, I made sure that out of my funds I
deposited the rent onto a pile of notes and coins accumulating on her dressing table. Jim
Thornton and John Hoskins were very loyal and came and lay by me on the bed watching telly
and helping me pass the time.
They were so unashamedly generous with their physical presence. It was so comforting to
have the warmth of close human bodies and a relief to understand that no one expected ‘anything
else’ to happen. I have found some of the best company in the physical warmth of my straight
men friends, men unafraid of being compromised as they are unquestioningly confident and sure
of their own sexuality, desire and intent. Bless you, dear, dear boys.
By the end of the first week of February, I felt strong enough to take a short walk to the end
of Westville Road and a week later I had ventured about three times as far to visit my university
friend Gillie Denton and her baby Ollie at 25 Wingate Road. We were eighteen years on from
our first meeting at Eliot College on that windswept Canterbury campus. How divergent had
been the paths of our lives!
By the time Judi returned from Australia and her time with Robyn Davidson on Monday
22nd February, I was well enough to go to lunch with Kenny Everett at CHANTERELLE on
Brompton Road, his favourite watering hole. His beautiful fantasy lover, the impossible and
unsustainable Russian Nikolai, had been ousted by our lovely John Pitt who had decided to move
back in with Kenny and to try again. I loved one piece of Aboriginal wisdom which Jude
imported and which I noted as very significant: “A rock is not just a rock; it is part of
an integrated, universal pattern in which every individual component is as
important as any other.”
Oooh – makes you think, this ‘dreamtime’ lark.
For Felicity, along with GOOD came David Essex. I liked David a lot. I even liked him
when he was David Essex and The Sands, way, way back. I remember he came to see us at Barry
Krost’s office in Curzon Street at the suggestion of Vincent Romeo but Barry was put off
working with him by the presence of a former manager. My and Vincent’s exhortations fell on
stony ground as we argued that David would need a ‘day-to-day’ manager as well as Barry’s pre-
eminent supervision but our encouragement met deaf ears, which was sad as David negotiated
himself away from the old manager very soon after Barry’s final ‘No’ and has been a star ever
since.
At the beginning of March, Felicity through her now vibrant association with the Royal
Shakespeare Company had somehow wangled tickets for us to attend the opening of the newly
commissioned Barbican Theatre the putative permanent home of the Company. So it was
arranged that I accompany Felicity’s friend Eleanor David to watch our beloved Queen ‘do the
business’.
“The building with its massive, soaring areas of concrete and glass is
impressive in size and in feeling. It has a sense of permanence in that it could
have been on this site for a tradition of centuries. Saw The Queen very close to
and was reminded that the institution is only a woman and a rather short one to
boot. Saw lots of people – Michael Codron, Sebastian Graham-Jones with Sue
Fleetwood, Norman Rodway, Isobel Buchanan, Ian McKellen – Lots and lots.
So much power and wealth personified in one assembly of such comparative few
individuals, mostly in couples, Queen and Consort, Lords and Ladies, Misters and
Missuses. One realises, seeing the assembled folk tonight, that the real
motivating power behind a political economy lies in a very few hands in
comparison to the mass of the multitude. Power does not wear a celebrity face. It
is unidentifiable although tangible. Power is a fascinating quality, glamorous –
its intangibility makes it alluring and its possession is most attractive both to
the holder and the beholder. A heady commodity. It’s something that I recognise
but not something which I even faintly want to pursue. Perhaps the moral
responsibility of it is frightening if it is to be used benignly? Certainly, no
‘success’ can be achieved without it and the world seems incapable of living
without it, either in the wielding of or the yielding to.”
It was of course no surprise one day that I noticed a playing card lying face down and alone
on the pavement as I walked along Exhibition Road. Unlike the Jack of Hearts which I
discovered on the pavement last year, when I turned this card over, it proved to be a Joker! In
hindsight, the moment marked a turning point. Above all, even at the time, it reminded me that
thirteen years ago, I was cleaning apartments and ended up working for Silvio Narizzano. Now,
April 1982, my situation and prospects were not dissimilar. Indeed, Richard Willing-Denton for
whom I secured the gig of writing the music for the Narizzano production of LOOT had asked
me to help him in the production of his project to make a movie of Hugh de Selincourt’s THE
CRICKET MATCH, a novel written in 1921 and quintessentially English. The movie never
happened.
Through telephoning Sara Randall merely to enquire her health and circumstance, I received
the offer of a job. Sara asked me to work for her as her assistant, beginning on May 22nd.
However, Sara being Sara, the lack of generosity of which she complained when in Barry
Krost’s employ seemed to have also afflicted her and the offer was not of the most attractive
financially. Moreover, the post was only three days a week. So, whether I accept or not,
remained to be seen. What was incontrovertibly to be seen is that life can begin again.
To wile away the intervening month, I could reflect happily on having sold another story to
GAY TIMES for which I was paid, this time, thirty pounds and I set myself a-scribbling once
more. Whilst I wiled, that Joker I’d picked up, that wild card, finally found its place in my hand.
I was staying with John Hoskins and his family at Bailiff’s Court outside Bognor Regis when I
learned that in the last week of March, the house in Malvern - my magnificent folly - Le Bol a
Tout Faire had been sold, for £44,000.
All my debts to bank and family were thus able to be settled and after agents and solicitor’s
expenses had been deducted I received £21,191, an amount which easily and fully vindicated me.
All my initial theory had worked out, in that the increased value of the property, now realised,
had more than paid for the ‘folly’ and had left me with a profit of some seven thousand pounds,
tax free.
My constitution had not recovered sufficiently to mount any sort of celebration and I
remember that I enjoyed what should have been yippee-yi-ay elation sitting quietly astride a
wooden groyne on the pebble beach at the edge of the Bailiff’s Court estate, watching the
repetition of the Channel’s un-failing grey waves. I remember feeling a deep, deep sadness and
regret that plan A hadn’t worked out rather than any ephemeral pleasure or satisfaction that plan
B had.
When I returned to London, I visited a car lot on Goldhawk Road and thus became mobile
again, on both four and two wheels having bought, respectively, a blue Triumph Estate car for
£1100 and a brand-new blue bike for a horribly expensive sum. Daisy was getting back on his
feet. Rather, on his wheels.
“I had entertained so many idle plans of what I was going to do with my
money. I have done nothing. At the moment, I want nothing more than what I have.
I want the highest quality in my life, not the largest quantity. I want to love
and be loved and to feel free to do both, to give and to receive in grateful
acknowledgement of the preciousness of life and the joy of living it through good
and bad, advantage and disadvantage, comfort and discomfort.”
Of course, it was not only very easy to make plans where there were none but that these
plans should both formulate so incredibly quickly only to disintegrate with just as much speed
rather took the wind from my sails. However, where the fancy for these plans came from I don’t
know but I had been lately reading a biography of Lord Byron. Maybe it was spurred by this
man’s European life, but I fondly embraced the notion that I might get into my newly acquired
roomy blue estate car, in which I could also sleep if necessary, and travel from capital to capital
in a Europe which was proving to be newly vibrant and exciting and to write of my experiences
as ‘an accidental homosexual’, as a later friend of mine was wont to say.
I started to formulate these plans. I recorded in my journal – as a nota bene – to myself –
that I was thirty-five; HALF-WAY THROUGH, I added in capital letters with three exclamation
marks, (!!!) presumably to emphasise that time was running out and to remind myself that I had
wasted so much. Feeling a little better, walking through Holland Park on my way home from
visiting John Pitt at The Westside Gym one evening, I met a man called John Gibbs. The
meeting was only significant at the time because it was my first sexual encounter since being ill
and the resulting rumpty-tumpty was, as I should have expected, doomed. If my theory held
water that gay boys were defined by sex, the definition of me which Mister Gibbs must have
carried away was that of my being an abysmal failure. But, hail fellow and well-met … I
wandered back along Bayswater and Goldhawk Roads to my lodgings.
The arrangements for Daisy’s Grand Tour were fairly far-advanced when on the evening of
the fourteenth of April, whilst wandering Hampstead Heath, I stumbled upon the rest of my life.
I wasn’t looking for it that night. I’d never associated the paths which criss-crossed Hampstead
Heath with those of true love. I suppose I must have at least associated the rest of my life with
true love but the joint concept had lately languished without currency and Hampstead Heath was
the last place I thought it might be redeemed.
Anyway, the rest of my life turned out to be called Nigel Quiney.

What A Catch
 “APRIL 24th 1982: As I write this, I feel that warm excited anticipation
clutching at my heart, deep in my chest. I think of him and feel wanted. He tells
me that I am wanted. I am very happy and cannot wait to see him again on May 10th
as he is away on business in the Far East. Sexually I am excited by him and look
forward to making love instead of, as usual, having sex. I know what ‘making
love’ is now, and I am grateful that I have been able to encounter and experience
it. I want so much to make ‘it’ work, this time - (“Whatever”, as Prince Charles was
so famously to opine, “‘it’ might be”)
- and for however long ‘it’ might last. He is
forty-three and I am thirty-five. We are two grown men, aware of the hurt and
pain in both our pasts and anxious to use the correct materials to fill the holes
in both our lives. I know we are being cautious, wise even and I don’t blame us.
The jewel has been found again; it must be handled with the respect its tradition
and implications deserve.
I have no expectations and attach no conditions to my commitment to him. I
hope I make him happy and want to make him happier. I’ve met his mother, Marion
who is seventy-four and seems very sweet; his brother Tony, his sister-in-law
Lynn and their daughters Harriet and Matilda. I had lunch with the family when I
drove Nigel and his mother to the airport. I want to write more about him but I
shall wait until I know him better.
Absence from him so soon is an unknown quantity. I shall, and can, say no
more. It hurts but it is necessary for we are two individuals and, as such, have
to have separate lives to confirm our individualities. If a relationship is to
develop between us, I want it to be something ABOVE ourselves, something special,
a sanctuary to which we can each bring our separate joys and cares as to a
refuge, where we can protect ourselves and from which we can take strength …”
Twenty-six years later, I shall put a full stop to this tale of me which became the tale of us.
Then I was thirty-five, Nigel was forty-three. As I write, I am sixty-one and Nigel is almost
seventy. What else there will be to write about is now no longer down to me for I am dependent
on others, upheld by unseen hands and I no longer know whose they are. I merely hope, like
Chris Hewitt, that when my own time comes, they can manage my awful bulk and lift me too,
high up into the field of stars.
And, all around us, the world falls apart. Banks collapse, huge financial institutions are
being bailed out by governments which a year ago would have found fiddling with ‘the market’
abhorrent. Capitalism in its purest sense died this week in September 2008. Greed and corruption
and politics can screw up any system. Who knows if there will even be a next week?
But even in all the current economic uncertainty, I know that over a quarter-of-a-century ago
I made a decision that night on Hampstead Heath and, for once, it seems that it was the right one.
Maybe, just maybe I did something right? We don’t necessarily need ‘the devil’s beauty’ after all
and certainly not someone else’s. It had always been Fools’ Gold.
And, one last observation, do you, dear reader, recollect the name John Gibbs? He featured
in this memoir not a few paragraphs ago. Well, not a few weeks after meeting the love of my life
than we were preparing to go to his house at East Dean in Sussex for the weekend with a few of
his friends, friends I had not met before and we were to be giving a lift to one of these. I was, to
say the least, surprised when through Nigel’s front door came aforementioned John Gibbs.
Passing all understanding, John and Nigel had apparently been good friends for many years.
None was more surprised, I have to say, than Nigel for I immediately ‘’fessed up’ as to what had
happened.
I shall leave you to ponder on the nature of co-incidence and to help you, I precis a passage
from THIS WAS THE REAL LIFE, a book about Freddie Mercury I wrote with my dear David
Minns in 1991 and which, being so long out of print, I have recently republished in Minns’
memory. Reader, you might remember my doing a reading of the I CHING for Freddie some
years back, one which threw up this definition of his state of life: FREEDOM IS A MOUNTAIN
LAKE. Remember too that Freddie was quick to dismiss any relevant interpretation of this
Confucian synthesis out-of-hand. Well, thirty years after this ‘consultation’, I now realize that it
had been at Montreux, in Switzerland, by that pleasant town’s calming and fluent body of water,
that Freddie had found his last expression. There, he recorded his last songs beneath the
mountains and there he did his last work, MADE IN HEAVEN, having bought a beautiful
lakeside apartment there. Though he died in London, his end, his freedom, his last stop, came
beside a mountain lake. Or does that make everything just too impossibly tidy?
Still, as he would say, there you have it, dears …
All the rest, all the sound and fury, the contents of these twenty-six years of ours you can
find elsewhere if you fancy. They’ve been well-recorded and intimately documented in books
and novels and in biographies of the lives of significant others; they’re in travel journals,
photograph albums, in the contents of two homes and in our respective memoirs and ultimately
in the host of memories which surrounds us as densely as flights of angels on the wing.

FROM EACH, FOR BOTH

On another side of sunset in a Neverland of dreams

Lay a realm of new beginnings, floating on a sea of schemes …
An oddly matched affair are we, a battleground of harmony,
For we are kings who share our throne, two kings who cannot rule alone.
Beneath time’s blanket, tucked in tight, we cling, adrift in starlit night
Through which our feisty fancies fly, painting lifelines in the sky.
But hush …
And so to bed, my love, my friend, and lie with me ‘til dreaming’s end
‘Til others sleep here in our place, a different love, the same embrace.

The End
INDEX OF NAMES

Brook Adams, American actress

David Agnew, Evans family’s solicitor and trustee of my grandfather’s trust
Mabel Aitken, Dundee contemporary of Jessie Murray
Alan Alexander, Scottish painter
Peter Allen, Australian entertainer
Jonathan Altaras, Film and theatre agent
Carol Amos, Riddian and Ashley Amos, Malvern chefs and cooks
Kate Anderson, My sister Elizabeth’s ex-partner
Derek Andrew, Evans family solicitor and trustee of my grandfather’s trust
Sharon Arden, (Osbourne) Daughter of Don Arden, married Ozzie Osbourne
Sally Atkins, Press and Publicity department Rocket Records
Gordon Atkinson, General Practitioner
John Aukin, Actor, husband to Lee Everett
Mary Austin, Freddie Mercury’s longstanding friend

Derek Balcombe, Driver, chauffeur and confidant

Dudley Bailey, Painter, father of Julian
Julian Bailey, Student at Malvern College and painter
Clive Banks, Then, executive at Island Records
Toby Barnes, Malvern College Student and potter
Keith Barron and Mary, Actor and restaurateur and his wife
Ann Bartlett, My childhood friend
Tony Beckley, Film actor, ex-partner of Barry Krost
Raphael Beldovsky, Ed Murray’s name after deed poll change
Jim and Claudia Beach, Music business lawyer and QUEEN’s manager
Laura Beggs, Rocket Records Press Officer
Colin Bell, Artistes Management agent
Moira Bellas, Press and Publicity executive
Jill Bennett, Actress
Mary Berry, AGA cook
Suzanne Bertish, Actress
Sonia Black, Antique dealer,
Lionel Blair, Dancer and actor
June Bolan, Mark Bolan’s wife
George Bond, Actor, model
Tony Booth, Actor, married to Pat Phoenix, father to Cherie Blair
Annie Bray, My grandmother
Cherry Brown, Maitre d’ and greeter
John Brown, Then office junior now major publisher
Olive Brown, Cherry Brown’s mother
Alan Browning, Actor
Angela Bruce, Actress
Sarah Bullen, Actress
Jeffrey Byron, Actor

Frank Caldwell, Solicitor at Harbottle and Lewis

Stephen Carey, Farmer at Hinton Charterhouse
Judy Carne, Actress
James Carter, Barman in Bristol club
Neil Carter, John Reid’s assistant
Mick Casson, Potter
Pan Casson (Henry), Gallery owner
CATS Rufus, Monty, Tabitha and Masha
Augusta Challis, My neice
Penny Cherns, Theatre Director
David Clark, Art Appraiser
Robin Clark, Student at St James’ School
Roger Clifford, Publicity executive and theatre producer
Kate Clough, Malvern student, my waitress
George Clugson, Scottish shop manager
Joan Coates, Malvern antique dealer
Bruce Cochrane, Malvern College student
David Coleman, Television sports broadcaster
Peter Collier, General Practitioner
Peter Collinson, Film Director
Audrey Cook, Company Secretary J Evans and Son Ltd
Douglas Cooper, Art collector and writer
Ray Cooper, Percussionist
Robert Cork, Journalist in Bristol and London
David Costa, Rocket Records and Wherefore Art director and designer
Florence Courtice, Bristol barmaid
Chas Courtier, Malvern College student
Simon Cowell, Television and music producer
Alastair Carew Cox, Malvern College art student
Heather Cox, Alastair’s aunt
Nell Creese, Resident of Hanley Castle
Mr Crippen, Then Malvern’s public health inspector
Annette Crosbie, Actress
Geoff and Olive Cundy, My parents’ neighbours
Tim Curry, Actor and singer
Fred Curtis, Hinton Charterhouse resident
Wesley Curtis, Malvern plumber

Major Davey, ex-owner of Homewood

Eleanor David, Actress
Tudor Davies, Actor, dancer, director
Eric and Jane Davidson, Edinburgh antique dealers
Felicity Dean, Actress,
Kiki Dee, Singer and Actress
Bill Denny, Malvern College art teacher
Gillie Denton, My Kent university alumnus
Jack Dervan, Painter and decorator
Peter Dingley, Gallery owner
Robert Dirskovski, Publishing and publicity relations executive
Barbara Dixon, Scots singer and actress
John Dodds, Film executive
Peter Doherty, Ballet and theatre director and designer
Sid Doran, Malvern electrician
Mark Dotteridge, Model and writer

Andy Eastwood, Malvern ceramics painter

Nick Eastwood, Television company manager
George Elas, Scots antique dealer, Ed Murray’s lover
Cassian Elwes, Hollywood film executive
David Essex, Singer, writer and actor
Richard Evans, My younger brother
Jenny Evans (nee Hill), Richard Evans’ ex-wife
Mary and Pat Evans, My parents
Elizabeth (Liz) Evans, My sister
Kenny Everett, Disc Jockey, performer, writer
Lee Everett, Wife to Kenny Everett and then to David Aukin
Steve Everitt, Malvern art student
Bob and Francesca Ezrin, American Record and Music producer and his wife

Rory Faber, Friend of Sarah (then) Forbes

Joe Fanelli, Freddie Mercury’s lover, then cook/assistant
Michael Fish, London shirt designer and socialite
James Fisher, Recording company and music executive
Bryan Forbes, Writer, director and actor
Emma Forbes, Daughter to Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman
Guy Ford, Film producer, director, actor
Doris Foreman, Mother to the writer Martin Foreman
Alex Foster, My ex-assistant, sister to Julia Foster
David Fowler, Doctor,
Alan Freeman, Disc jockey and broadcaster

Patrick Gale, Writer, novelist

Joyce Gallie, Casting director
Paul Gambaccini, Writer and broadcaster
Mike Gill, Producer and publicity executive
Mr and Mrs Gilroy, Ex-owners of Homewood
Michael Golding, Friend and peer sans egal
Harvey Goldsmith, Music impressario
John Gordon Jones, Friend of David Minns
Margaret Gorman, My friend
Christina Gorst-Ellis, Then Malvern teacher
Daisy Gosden 69, Then Malvern music teacher
Jilly Graham, Friend of Sarah Cape
Sebastian Graham-Jones, My alumnus and theatre director
Melanie Green, Then friend of Elton John now Hollywood executive
Earl Grey, Drag performer and actor
Malcolm Grey, Friend of Freddie Mercury and hair stylist

Eric Hall, Then EMI record promotions manager

Michael (Micky, Mickey) Hannah, Died in Turkish Airlines Crash in 1973 Northern France,
Pete Hayes, Road manager
Sarah Harrison, Then assistant to Harvey Goldsmith
Russell Harty, Television interview show host
Christopher Hewitt, My school friend, poet and gay activist
Christine Heath, then wife to Philip Heath
Tara Heath, Philip Heath’s daughter, later his creative partner
Philip Heath, Potter and teacher
Colin Higgins, American writer, director
Michael Ho Chong, London club entrepreneur
Lyndon Holloway, Record promotions executive
Anthony Hopkins, Actor
John Hoskins, Malvern College student
Tim Hotham, Malvern College student
Frankie Howerd, Actor, comedian, performer
Verna Hull, Resident of Barbados
Christopher Hunter, Restaurateur and cabaret impressario
Suzanne Husson-Saget, My grandfather’s housekeeper

Kenneth Jackson, Edinburgh antique dealer

Derek Jarman, Painter, writer, film director
Jackie Jesse, Wife to John Jesse
John Jesse, London dealer in les Arts Decos
Elton John, Really …
Peter Jones, Freddie Mercury’s sometime driver and security officer

Elliot Kastner, American film producer, married to Tessa Kennedy

Robin Katz, American journalist
Tessa Kennedy, British designer and decorator, mother to Cassian Elwes
Robert Kidd, Scots theatre director
Barry Krost, British theatrical agent, artistes’ manager and film producer

Stanley Lamb, My father’s cousin

Harry Laubscher, Swiss nightclub entrepreneur
Charles Laurence, British playwright

Robert and Caroline Lee, Then London showbiz lawyer and Rocket Records Press officer
respectively

India Leon, Daughter to Sarah (Forbes) and John Standing

Dennis Lemon, Editor of GAY TIMES
Bernard Levin, Journalist and writer
Roddy Llewellyn, Then sometime- consort to Princess Margaret
Sir Joseph Lockwood, Chairman of EMI records
Jimmy Logan, Scots comedian and brother to Annie Ross
Roger Longrigg, British writer
Trisha Luxmoore, Homewood neighbour
Joanna Lyall, Friend of Michael Hannah

Howard Malin, Film producer

Ashley Major, Malvern College student
Gerard Manchon, Then, waiter at Country Cousin restaurant
Judi Maynard, Actress, decorator
Mr and Mrs McArthur-Reynolds, Mrs Mc-R had been born at Homewood
Billy McCarty, Art collector
Roger McCrum, Publisher and editor
Craig Macdonald, Press and public relations executive
Ben McKechnie, Malvern College student
Marjorie McKee, Music teacher at Malvern Girls College
Roger MacNichol, Cabin crew
Barbara Meaking, My godmother
Martin Melman, Accountant
Freddie Mercury, Yes …
Sorrel Merrick, Waitress at Le Bol a Tout Faire
David Meyer, My alumnus, actor and broadcaster
Scott Michaels, Researcher
Robin Miller, Writer and dramatist
David Minns, Music business executive and my great friend
Mrs Mitchell, Homewood neighbour
Edward Montagu, Professional peer and car collector
Andrew Moreglia, Then Bristol music student
Adrian Morris, Publisher and friend to Jack Tinker
Jamie Muir, Television executive, son of Frank.
Matt Munro, Singer
Michelle Munro, Singer’s daughter
Ed Murray, Antique dealer and my ex-partner
Belle and Aggie Murray, Ed’s aunts
Sidney Murray, Ed’s step-father
Jan Murray (Swanson), Ed’s mother
Nina Myskow, Journalist and broadcaster

Silvio Narizzano, Film and television director

Robin Nash, Television producer, notably of TOP OF THE POPS
Nanette Newman, Actress, writer and my friend
Martin Neill, Actor
Kim North, Auctioneer
Rodney North, Friend of Cherry Brown
Paul Northcott, Friend of John Reid

John Osborne, Dramatist and writer

Peter O’Toole, Actor and writer
Jenny Over, Then John Reid’s assistant and television executive

Hugh Paddick, Actor

Bob Peck, Actor
Grayson Perry, Potter
George Perry-Smith, Restaurateur
Mark Phillips, Musician, composer, actor and model
Sian Phillips, Actress and writer
John Pitt, Bonzer geezer
Pat Phoenix, Actress
Christopher Plume, Antique dealer
Larry Polk, Then friend of Colin Higgins
Jean Preece, Antique Dealer
Princess Margaret, Professional princess
Brian Protheroe, Actor, composer, musician and performer
Joan Pugh, Malvern magistrate

Sarah Radcliffe, Film producer

Larry Reade, Then Worcester and Malvern’s only punk
John Reid, Manager of Elton John, Patricia (Pat) Phoenix and Queen, producer and entrepreneur
Mr Roberts (Blacksmith), Blacksmith
Roy Roberts, Television producer

Bruce Robinson, Writer and actor

Annie Ross, Singer and actress
Lucy Rogers, St James School student

Robin Sachs, Actor, ex-husband of Sian Phillips

Barbara Sammeth, American actress and friend to Colin Higgins
Paul and Rosie Samwell-Smith, Music producer and legal eagle respectively
Iqbal Shaik, Malvern College Student
Philip and Veronica Shaw, Assistant to Bryan Forbes and restaurateurs
Claire (Wizzy) Shawyer, Malvern art student
Jenny Sieff, Partner of Robert Kidd
Georgina Simpson (Andrews), Actress
Robin Soans, Actor, once friend to Ed Murray
Michael Somerton. Theatrical and television entrepreneur
Gordon Spead, American teacher
Bob Stacey, Elton John’s tour manager
Charles Storr, Then builder
John Standing, Actor, husband to Sarah Forbes
Nigel Steel, Malvern College Student
Doctor Robin Steel, His father
Cat Stevens, Then … who knows.
Peter Straker, Actor, singer, social light
David Straker-Smith, Then friend of Cassian Elwes
Richard Sweet, Bristol Club owner

John Tagholm, My Kent University alumnus, television producer and novelist

Graham and Ros Tarrant, Publishers
Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s lyricist and novelist
Maxine Taupin, His ex-wife
Robert Thomas, Rhonda antique dealer
Nick Thomson, Friend of Peter Wood
Jim Thornton, Malvern College student
Jack Tinker, Drama critic and journalist
Brian and Margie Tippets, Homewood neighbours
Stuart Tovey, Then Bristol doctor
Michael Trigg, Old Hancastrian in Malvern
Douglas Trout, London hairdresser
Susan Tracy, Actress
Margaret Trudeau, wife to Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada
Simon Turner, Actor, performer

Clodagh Wallace, Theatrical Agent, represented Tim Curry and Peter Straker
Tony Warren, Writer, journalist and creator of CORONATION STREET
Richard Warwick, Actor
Tom Watkins, Music entrepreneur and style guru
Nellie Whitley, First customer of Le Bol a Tout Faire
Richard Willing-Denton, My Kent University alumnus, television producer and writer
Keith Wilson, Television and film designer
Kenneth Williams, Actor, writer, broadcaster
Christopher Wiltshire, Friend to Robert Thomas
Ernst Wolder, Actor, friend to Pat Phoenix
Peter Wood, Theatre and Opera Director
Simon Wood, Malvern College Student
Emma Woofenden, St James School student
Julia Wooley, Friend to John Brown

Carl van der Voort, American gallery owner, lived on Ibiza

Alan Zubik, Former lover, Canadian

 BOOKS AVAILABLE BY DAVID EVANS, NIGEL QUINEY
FROM THE TUSITALA PRESS
12 Ripplevale Grove London N1 1HU Tel: 0207 607 0071 and The Shawl, 32 Warren Lane, Friston, East Sussex Tel: 01323
423684
[email protected]

All titles published by Tusitala Press are available via Print on Demand when ordered from bookshops or online retailers via
Gardners Books of Eastbourne.

JERUSALEM
By David Evans
ISBN 978-0-9558951-4-2
A Novel whose story is set in London and Somerset
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press

A CAT IN THE TULIPS

By David Evans
ISBN 978-0-9558951-6-6
A Novel whose story is set in the Sussex village of East Dean
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press

A LETHAL DOSE OF MURDER

By David Evans
ISBN 0 9533341 4 7
A Novel whose story is set in London and in Malven Worcestershire. Two elderly lady sleuths investigate …
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press

A HOLLYWOOD CONSCIENCE
By David Evans
ISBN 978-0-9558951-5-9
A Novel telling the tale of a young man who found himself a Porn Star
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press

PORN STARS Inc.

By David Evans
ISBN 0 9533341 2 0
A Novel telling the story of what happened to the young man who found fame as a Porn Star in A HOLLYWOOD
CONSCIENCE.
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press

THE AFTERLIFE – Freddie Mercury

By David Evans and Peter Freestone
ISBN 0 9533341 1 2
The Life and Death of Freddie MERCURY and Afterwards
(Peter Freestone was Freddie’s Assistant and was with him right to the end)
Retail £16.00
Tusitala Press
FREDDIE MERCURY – WHAT HE LEFT BEHIND
By David Evans
Tusitala Press. Available only as an e:book, first published in greater length as
The Afterlife – Freddie Mercury, the paperback version written with Peter Freestone being still available.

THIS WAS THE REAL LIFE

By David Evans
ISBN978-0-9558951-0-4
Memories of Freddie Mercury
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press. Also available as an e:book.

APPOINTMENTS WITH THE DREAM FAIRY

By David Evans
ISBN 0 9533341 3 9
A Memoir of a young man from Malvern who came to London and found himself involved in the theatre film and music industry
in the nineteen-seventies. Including memories of Cat Stevens, Freddie Mercury, Peter Finch, Angela Lansbury, Colin Higgins,
Tim Curry, John Osborne 1947 - 1976
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press. Also available as an e:book.

A SEASON OF OUTRAGE/WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS

By David Evans
ISBN 978-0-9558951-7-3
A Second Volume of Memoir.
The Music Business, Personalities and Celebrities and learning how to be ordinary again, afterwards … 1976 - 1982
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press. Available as an e:book entitled WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS.

THE BOY WHO LOOKED AT THE MOON

By David Evans
ISBN 978-0-9558951-1-1
The life and Times of CAT STEVENS
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press. Also available as an e:book.

MOMENTS OF ENGLISHNESS
By David Evans
In e:book form only.
Four hundred pages of essays, memoir and journal extracts recalling the author’s life as an Englishman. Includes memories of
Freddie Mercury, Cat Stevens, Kenny Everett, Elton John, Oliver Messel, Bryan Forbes, Nanette Newman as well as good
ordinary folks who deserve more than even the author could write. Available in 2016 at £3.99 retail.

A COCK-EYED OPTIMIST
By Nigel Quiney
0 9533341 6 3
A memoir of a young man from a London suburb during and after the Second World War and of growing up gay in the capital.
1938 – 1959.
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press. Also available as an e:book.

MORE COCK-EYED OPTIMISM

By Nigel Quiney
ISBN 978-0-9558951-2-8
A second volume of memoir embracing the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, telling of the business he established selling gift-wrap and
cards as well as gay life in London, Europe and the United States.
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press. Also available as an e:book.
CONFESSIONS OF A COCK-EYED OPTIMIST
By Nigel Quiney
ISBN 978-0-9558951-8-0
A third memoir embracing the nineteen-seventies sees the subject deeply involved in international business and commerce and
still looking for love.
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press. Also available as an e:book.

CONCLUSIONS OF A COCK-EYED OPTIMIST

By Nigel Quiney

The fourth and final memoir beginning in the early eighties at the time when the subject meets his life partner and the ensuing
tale of their life together, of the business the subject pursued and of life after an early and welcome retirement.
Retail £12.99
Tusitala Press. Also available as an e:book.

STITCHES IN TIME
By David Evans and Nigel Quiney
ISBN 0 9533341 9 8
An A3 size book and an e:book with colour illustrations throughout of the needlepoint work of the authors up to 2007 with
accompanying texts and tales.
(Only available from the authors, price £30 and as an e:book in colour at £3.99

Also by David Evans …

(With Peter Freestone)
FREDDIE MERCURY – An Intimate Memoir
Published by Omnibus Books
Book Still Available

(With Scott Michaels)

The Rocky Horror Show – From Concept to Cult
Published by Sanctuary Books
(Out of Print)

The Bad Boys Book of Bedtime Tales

Published by Zipper Books
(Out of Print)

Scissors and Paste – Dusty Springfield

Published by Britannia Press
(Out of Print)

From Mae to Madonna – The Twentieth

Century Blondes Published by Britannia Press
(Out of Print)