3. LATER CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

The trauma of George’s mother’s sudden death was added to when ‘we moved to a new house with electric lights and I slept in a huge bed cuddled close to my father. Then I played truant simply because I preferred sleep to school.’ One morning George was rudely awoken from a dream about the lessons he was evading when his irate father pulled him from the bed and took him to school. He was later told that this lapse in his schooling ‘prompted my father to find a replacement surrogate mother, whose name was Lizzie Lang’.

 

George wrote: ‘I needed a maternal figure. I was a lonely child with no friends because we’d moved to another district and another school. My sisters wouldn’t let me accompany them with their boyfriends to the cinema. So suddenly being given a stepmother who promised presents and security, I clung to her like a chick in the secure wings of a mother hen.

 

‘But along with this new mother came a stepbrother, Robin, with whom I formed a strange relationship. He was 2/3 years older. A delinquent - I stole from him. He killed my pet hamster and helped me bury it in the garden. He committed crimes. He liked rock’n’roll, Cliff Richard, Little Richard. We shared the same bed. We formed a sado-masochistic relationship. He tormented and taunted me with tricks. I suppose I was a horrible boring little brat.’

 

George told me quite a bit about this love-hate relationship with his stepbrother. Robin squeezed the life out of George’s pet hamster while George looked on powerless to stop him. He also tormented him by playing loud Little Richard and other rock’n’roll records, and he dressed as a Teddy-boy. Years later George met me, who also loved Little Richard and rock’n’roll, had a quiff and sometimes wore the Teddy-boy gear. I can’t help feeling that must have been part of his attraction towards me, though he never admitted it in so many words. George’s sado-masochistic relationship with his stepbrother affected his later sexual tastes, but I could never role-play the sadistic Robin - I loved and respected George too much as a person. So we developed a deep, emotional, non-sexual relationship over the years we were together.

 

George related three slightly different versions of what happened sexually between him and Robin. Certainly they shared a bed, and George used to feel the bed shake at night when Robin was masturbating, but at first did not know what was going on. After he had been ‘initiated by a kind strange man into the mysteries and magic of masturbation’, George realized what Robin was doing under the bedclothes. This is where the story becomes a little confused.

 

According to the version most often told by George, his stepbrother came home frustrated one night from a date with his girlfriend and sexually abused George. Remembering the earlier sexual abuse by a girl cousin, George used to say he had suffered child sexual abuse from both a man and a woman.

 

In his written versions, the sexual relationship with Robin is actually initiated by George. In one version, in which the names of both parties have been changed since it was obviously intended for publication, Robin changed out of his tight blue jeans into his football gear and left, but returned to the bedroom to catch George masturbating with his face buried in the discarded jeans. ‘Angrily, he swore at me, calling me a dirty fucking little bastard, put me across his knee, and started spanking me.’  This resulted in George experiencing an orgasm. ‘From that experience, the seeds of sado-masochistic sex were sowed inside me’, George wrote.

 

This initial episode is omitted from one written version, but both mention another (later) occasion when George felt and heard his stepbrother masturbating and Robin let George grope and then give him oral sex. After two minutes it was all over, and the young George could not understand why Robin (feeling guilty and ashamed) angrily pushed him aside. When George persisted with his groping, Robin ‘roughly turned me face-down on the bed, kicking me with his knee-cap, as the sound of spanking would have woken up the rest of the family.’ George wrote that he bribed Robin ‘with a pound of my pocket money’ to keep doing it till George climaxed, ‘and not tell our respective parents about my sexual misbehaviour’.

 

On yet another occasion, apparently the one George referred to when he spoke of being sexually assaulted by his stepbrother, Robin attempted to penetrate George anally, but was not very successful. Although George was presumably willing to lose his virginity, it was physically impossible without experience and a lot of lubricant. (In fact I myself only ever made one attempt, and was also unsuccessful.)

 

This rather one-sided sex in which only Robin received gratification seems only to have occurred on two or three sporadic occasions, and George wrote that ‘Robin rejected me completely with contempt.’

 

Three months after the last incident mentioned above, Robin married a girl whom he had made pregnant, and it was the end of George’s sexual relations with him. George wrote: ‘The only time I ever saw my stepbrother again, was when I was 25 and went back home, where I met him in the street where he introduced me to his wife and 4 children.’

 

George heard from his sister that their stepbrother later ‘had formed a suspect and scandalous relationship with a notorious homosexual with whom he shared a cell’ in prison. ‘He was last seen as an alcoholic deserted by his wife, mother and sisters and living in a hostel for the homeless. He could well be one of those huddled figures I hurriedly pass by as I go under Hungerford Bridge on certain nights.’

 

These are the last words written in George’s autobiographical notes, which he never completed. The rest of the story before he met me must come from things he and his friends have told me. It certainly seems George was initiated into gay sex at a very early age, possibly as young as 12, and that by the time he moved to London at the age of 16 he was quite experienced, having been on the gay scene in Glasgow for several years.

 

In complete contrast, down in the London area I knew I was gay from the age of 13, but was totally isolated and frustrated throughout my teens, and never experienced sex of any kind until well into my twenties.

 

By the time I was 12 I had about three good friends at my secondary modern school. One in particular, Paul, introduced me to rock’n’roll records by Little Richard, Elvis Presley, etc., and I was amazed these little 45s could be bent without breaking, unlike the old 78s we used to have. Paul, and some other boys, also had access to books depicting nude females, and he had a crush on Diana Dors, who was a very big film star at the time. I took quite an interest in these pictures and in break times we made up fantasies involving Paul’s imaginary Uncle Flook (the man with the oversized knob), Diana Dors and other women. I even had a crush on a girl in my class, making my brother take a round-about route to school so I could pass her house. I would then follow her all the way, pulling her pony-tail and teasing her.

 

After one of my spells in hospital, I returned to school, and Michael, my best friend, broke the news that this girl had died of Asian Flu, which swept Britain in 1958. I don’t think anybody knew I had a crush on her (except my mother who I told later), but I was quite upset at the time.

 

In that year there were enormous changes in my life. We’d moved house, from my grandparents’ place to a council flat in an old house at Alexandra Park. I spent most of the first part of the year in hospital for operations on my leg and on my lip. Still they kept me in hospital, and doctors kept coming in and looking at my private parts. I was not told anything, but I remember on a visit to the out-patients some time earlier my grandmother had taken me in to the almoner and whispered to her: ‘He’s not developing properly’.

 

I was only told a day or two before the operation that it had to be done ‘or I couldn’t get married and have children’. I was bitterly opposed to it, having had enough of hospitals and operations, and despising this seemingly unnecessary one about which everyone was being so secretive and deceitful. They seemed to be forcing me to have some operation I did not understand and did not want, without even bothering to tell me, let alone get my consent.

 

As my mother sat by my hospital bed and tried to explain why I could not come home yet but had to have a third operation during this one hospital stay, I argued vehemently with her:

 

‘I don’t want to get married and have children. I wasn’t meant to - that girl I was fond of died.’

 

It was no use. A 13-year old has no rights and the operation was done. It had a traumatic effect which ruined my teenage years, and affected the rest of my life. I do not blame my mother or grandparents, they thought they were doing the right thing. But the hospital should have known better and should have told them I had to be taken into their confidence at a very early stage, or the operation could have a devastating psychological effect on me. I am still not even convinced it was necessary, as puberty sometimes comes late, and I was barely 13 when the operation was done. It could certainly have been left another year or so. I also should have had psychological counseling both before and after the operation, but this was 1958 when such things were unheard of.

 

Some months later I had to return to the hospital for another operation to remove the deep stitches, and on being discharged, my brother and I went on a holiday in Saffron Walden staying at a sort of hostel. Two other boys shared our bedroom and for the very first time I began to be conscious of homosexual fantasies (about these boys). I had often fantasized about Diana Dors and the nude women in the picture books, but never about boys or men before. It was as though subconsciously I was rebelling against the operation, and making good my statement that I would never marry and have children. I found I enjoyed homosexual fantasies much more than heterosexual ones, and from that point on I knew I was gay. I had to wait nine long, miserable, frustrated, lonely years before I could even begin to fulfil those fantasies.

 

I was partly to blame for initiating queries about my development, for a year or two earlier when I shared a bedroom with my brother, he had awoken in the night frightened and worried because he had experienced his first erection, and thought something was wrong. I am ashamed to say that I did not reassure him, though I did of course experience erections myself. However, feeling guilty about the nudie picture books at school and the sexy stories about women I swopped with Paul (whom I knew my mother disapproved of as a bad influence), I made out I did not know what was wrong with his cock, and my mother must have been acutely embarrassed when Philip called her in. She then explained that this happens as you get older, and turned to me and said: ‘Yours goes the same, doesn’t it, Tony?’, whereupon I guiltily denied it.

 

Without a father to explain such matters to us, we lived in a sexually repressive household in which the only message which got drummed through to us was: ‘Never talk to strange men, never accept lifts or sweets from strangers and never use public toilets.’ This message had the effect of brainwashing, so that I obeyed it automatically, blocking off most possibilities of my experiencing gay sex and condemning myself to a miserable, isolated, frustrated teenage. Gays have to take some risks or we would never meet anyone like ourselves and would be forced to remain celibate all our lives.

 

This denial by me that I experienced sexual arousal must have alerted my mother to the fact that puberty had not yet taken place, and started her secret inquiries which led to the two dreaded operations. The physical and mental scars left by them made me even more introverted than ever, and I withdrew into a shell. To make matters worse, I changed schools in September and left my few friends behind. Michael was at my new school (actually a Technical College), but in a different department. He was doing a technical course to become a draftsman or architect, and I was doing a general business course. Again I found myself in a predominantly girls’ school, with only seven other boys in my class, and nine in the class above. No more boys were taken for this course in the classes below us. One of the boys left in the first week to go back to his old school, and I should have done the same, for I could not get on with any of my remaining male school-mates, even though I had a crush on one of them.

 

The trauma of the operation left me in a terrible state where I found it so hard to socialize with people of my own age that my school nickname became ‘sociable’. Whilst longing to be friends with them, I would go and stand on my own at break times while they all gathered together. Nobody came and tried to befriend me, as Michael had once done. I stopped doing games and PT because I did not want any other boys to see my operation scars in the showers, even though those that showed most were on my upper thighs and would not readily be connected with an operation on my private parts. My mother had also changed our surname to avoid all the difficulties my Greek one caused, thinking no-one at my new school would know. However, one boy had come from my old school and told them all my real name, and then accusingly demanded to know why I pretended it was something else now.

 

As our class was nearly all girls, we took games with Michael’s class every Monday afternoon, and I used to look forward to walking together from the college to Tottenham marshes where the other boys used to play football. On some occasions Michael would make out he was ill so he could spend the whole afternoon with me, for all I used to do was sit on my own while the others played. I hated football, cricket and all sport, and would run away from the ball if forced to play. Once they asked me to be a linesman in football, but I did not know what that meant and cared even less, so just lay down and fell asleep. They never asked me again.

 

When the girls in our class did PT, we boys had to just sit in the boys’ changing room amusing ourselves all afternoon. There was much talk about homosexuality, and David, the boy I had a crush on, used to always have his arm around another boy, who kept telling David how handsome he was, ‘more handsome than Gary’ in the class above, whom I also had a crush on. They used to play strip-poker (though it never went very far, usually just taking off a tie and undoing a few shirt-buttons), and even used to all go in the one toilet cubicle together and lock themselves in. I was not part of any of this and never found out what they did in there, though they came out arguing over who had won. I was loyal in my own way, as one day the PT teacher came in and asked why I was still sitting there:

 

‘We’ve not been told to go, Miss’ I said.

 

‘Well, it doesn’t seem to have bothered the others, you had better go too,’ she said. I never let on they were all in the toilet cubicle together. The only clue I got as to what they might be doing was during the annual end-of-year dance when they cleared the main hall of chairs and put on rock’n’roll records - one of my rare chances to hear this type of music at the time, for my mother and grandparents disapproved of ‘this awful, rowdy American music for hooligans’. I remember none of the boys were interested in dancing, so the girls jived with each other or teachers to tunes like Johnny and The Hurricanes’ ‘Red River Rock’. I was sitting on one of the seats along the wall, but behind me a row of chairs had been placed facing the wall just to get them out of the way of the dance floor. David and another boy were sitting in these seats masturbating themselves and measuring their members with rulers to see who had the biggest erection. I glanced over my shoulder and saw what they were doing, pretending to be disgusted at such behavior, though I didn’t say anything and was secretly quite turned on.

 

On another occasion we were in the changing room with some boys from another class, and two of them were pretending to be wrestling, but were actually having sex with their shorts and vests on, and everyone knew it. They were not gay, because at least one of the boys had a girlfriend. On one occasion my brother and I wrestled in this way, fully clothed, but apart from that the nearest I got to a sexual experience was when one boy pretended to punch me in my private parts, but did it so softly it was almost a grope. I cannot help wondering if I had not been in such a trauma, had made friends and been part of the secret sexual rites, whether I too would have ‘gone through that phase’ and passed on to a heterosexual development.

 

As it was I remembered with regret these lost opportunities for the rest of my life, and then heard about the teenage experiences of George and others. I became very bitter and twisted, especially when I learned that all the places I avoided in my teens were the very places where I could have made contact with the secret gay world. I lived or worked in London, which had the biggest gay scene in the country, yet rarely went to the West End, especially after dark. We moved to Welwyn Garden City when I was 16, and even though a year later I got a job in London and commuted, I was always at home in Hertfordshire’s suburbia by 6 p.m.. I never entered public toilets, talked to strangers or accepted lifts even in my late teens, and since I had no friends of my own age, I was completely isolated and sexually frustrated. Once, coming home from my grandmother’s bungalow, an attractive young man in a sports car offered me a lift and as I got excited and opened my mouth to say: ‘Yes, thank you very much,’ my automatic pilot took control and the words: ‘No thank you’ came out quite involuntarily. No doubt it saved me from all sorts of dangers, but this brainwashing also prevented me having the fun George and most other gay teenagers enjoyed.

 

On my fifteenth birthday my best friend, Michael, had died in hospital from injuries sustained when a car hit him while he was crossing a road the night before. I was devastated, because he was my one remaining true friend, having left the others at my old school which I’d left two years previously. My brother went to school in Hertfordshire and so made new friends, but I left college soon after we moved there. All my old school friends lived miles away in Wood Green, and I knew nobody my own age, and so my mother had to invite all my cousins and people from her work or I would have had very few people at my twentyfirst birthday party. Only two people from my work managed to come all the way from London.

 

My only pal during those lonely years was my brother, Philip, who was four years younger. I immersed myself in the anti-nuclear weapons movement, going on illegal Committee of 100 and legal Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament demonstrations. The illegal ones were more exciting, though I never actually got arrested till the big anti-Vietnam War demo in Grosvenor Square in the late 1960s. I took part in the big 1961 Trafalgar Square sit-down, however, and demonstrations against the visit to London of the fascist Queen Frederika of Greece. During one of these organized by the Committee of 100 we outflanked police lines blocking off Admiralty Arch and The Mall from Trafalgar Square and charged Buckingham Palace from Piccadilly across Green Park. As the mob reached the high walls of the Palace gardens, demonstrators helped others try to climb over. I got up as far as the huge spikes and thought better of it, though one guy actually got over into the gardens. I don’t know quite what we’d have done if we had all got over, we never actually thought ahead that far. Committee of 100 demonstrations became very spontaneous and increasingly violent as anarchists and trouble-makers attached themselves and tried to take over. In the beginning they were non-violent, self-disciplined and well organized. I also went on the Aldermaston marches, and ‘Gipsy’ Dave was a neighbor. He was a friend of folk-singer Donovan who lived in nearby Hatfield, and Dave called round to my house one day to ask for details about the Aldermaston March.  I worked at CND headquarters for 6 years, and on the 1963 Aldermaston March was faced with my boss, CND Organizing Secretary Peggy Duff, shouting through a loud-hailer:

 

‘Keep straight on for the lunch stop, marchers. No lunch down there, marchers.’

 

She was trying to stop the March diverting to Warren Row, a few hundred yards off the route, where a Committee of 100 off-shoot, Spies For Peace, had revealed there was a top-secret Regional Seat of Government bunker. I wondered if I would lose my job as I looked at Peggy, then defiantly turned left to go to the forbidden bunker.  A sort of half-hearted sit-down took place on top of the entrance, but most marchers wandered back to the main route after a quick look. In her book, ‘Left, Left, Left’, Peggy later admitted the decision to try to stop the marchers looking at Warren Row was wrong, but CND at the time was a stickler for legality. David Bolton, editor of CND’s newspaper ‘Sanity’, published the location of the RSG, and all the office staff, including myself, had to sit down and go through thousands of copies with a black marker in a vain attempt to obliterate the offending name Warren Row.

 

The March was famous for its musicians and songs, the most popular of which were the CND ‘anthem’ ‘The H-Bomb’s Thunder’, ‘Ban The Bloody H-Bomb’ (sung with real feeling and gusto), the Scots’ marchers’ ‘Ding Dong Dollar’ (adapted from ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’ and ‘Ye Cannae Shove Your Granny Off A Bus’), plus the Committee of 100s ‘anthem’ ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’.

 

‘Why do we always sing that, when we always are moved in the end?’ complained one demonstrator.

 

At least three special songs were composed for the revelation of the Warren Row RSG: ‘Ballad of Warren Row’, ‘Official Secret’ and ‘God Save Our RSG’, the latter to the tune of the National Anthem. With lines like: ‘I’ve got a secret, a nice Official Secret, and I’ll publish it for all the world to see.... ‘, ‘they’ll find room for Macmillan, and all the other villains...’, ‘there’ll be a pew for Supermac and one for Mr (Home Secretary Henry) Brooke, and a golden-plated RSG for Lizzie and the Dook’ and ‘our Queen could not care less, our country’s in a bloody mess... ‘ the songs were typically very irreverent, anti-Establishment and anti-Royalist.

 

I also became treasurer of the local CND group, who were nearly all middle-aged and middle class. My mother was horrified when two women from the local CND group first turned up on our doorstep in response to my application to join.

 

‘They are all Communists,’ she said, which of course wasn’t true at all. Nearly all the members of my local group were respectable Labour Party members. But my mother had been brought up in a working-class Conservative household of policemen, where anything vaguely anti-Establishment was frowned on as subversive.

 

So back in the mid-1950s, whilst I was still going to the Saturday morning pictures to watch ‘Flash Gordon’ and sing along with Uncle Bill and his Wurlitzer organ the ‘ABC Minors’ Song’ and the latest hits of the day (‘I Love to Go a Wandering’, ‘Over the Mountains Over the Sea’, etc.), George, only two years older, was already sexually active and beginning some remarkable encounters which will remain just gay sexual fantasies for myself and many others. Apart from the relationship with his stepbrother, there was a gay encounter with a uniformed soldier in an alley outside a cinema in Glasgow, and he was orally raped by an on-duty London policeman. Although it seems George had a very exciting teenage sexually, it was a hard life, and when you are cold, homeless and hungry, being raped by a policeman and threatened with arrest for vagrancy if you don’t submit can be, as George said, more of a frightening nightmare than a gay fantasy come true.

 

George had his first gay sexual encounter around 1955, was on the gay scene in Glasgow in his early and mid teens, came on the London gay scene about 1959, meeting me  in 1970 after about 15 years of gay experiences. By contrast, I left school in 1961 and had my first sexual experience (gay) in 1967 at the age of 22, so I only had three years experience when we met. No wonder he always seemed a generation older than me, being familiar with a gay London scene I never knew. George was 27 when we met, and although I was 25 in years, in terms of George’s sexual experience I was only 15 sexually, and still very much in the experimental stage when everything was new to me.