8. BRADFIELD COURT

 

As we went into 1971, which was to be our first full year together, my grandmother lay ill in hospital after the fall which broke her hip just after Christmas 1970. My mother spent the first four months of the year in Welwyn Garden City looking after my grandparents, and during that time George left John’s room in Pimlico and moved into Bradfield Court.

 

My mother had suggested it, saying it would be company for me while she was away. Like most suggestions she made, it was something she had obviously not thought out properly. So instead of being my friend or a lodger, George became my ‘brother’ as far as the neighbors were concerned, in case my mother should cause gossip and possibly lose her council tenancy by taking in her son’s boyfriend. However, for the first year or so the honeymoon period between George and my mother lasted, and they were on quite good terms.

 

In the first weeks of 1971, before he moved in with me, George continued to visit regularly. We went to ‘The Black Cap’ pub in Camden Town, which had recently been refurbished as a gay bar. (Previously, when I lived with Kenny on the other side of Camden High Street, the back bar of what was then a straight pub had been known as ‘The Spanish Bar’ and had bullfighting/flamenco motifs around the walls). A drag artist known as ‘Mrs Shufflewick’ was on there in January. George remembered her from when she used to be on TV. In later years we regularly saw Mrs Shufflewick and the great Marc Fleming at this pub.

 

Also in January George came to Welwyn Garden City for the first time to meet my mother’s gay ex-boss and his lover. Ed and Tony showed us their holiday slides of Tenerife, but I blew it by telling them I was a card carrying member of the Communist Party, and we were never invited back

 

This was the only occasion George visited my grandparents’ bungalow, just down the road from Ed and Tony’s place. It was also the only time he saw my grandfather. My grandmother was in hospital so he never met her.

 

Soon after this George moved in with me and my mother. It must have been a very big decision for him, though I suppose he could have always gone back to John’s room if things did not work out. Happily, it did not come to that.

 

We continued to go out and see films like ‘10 Rillington Place’, and also enjoyed staying in together and watching TV programs like ‘A Family At War’, which made Wednesday nights really special for us. Just before my birthday on March 20th George has notes in his diary about ‘Tony’s ring’, so I suppose the ‘wedding ring’ he bought me was given to me on my birthday. I also bought him one. We wore them till he died, and I now wear both.

 

He also wrote in his diary reminders about Mother’s Day, which was the day after my birthday that year. George had lost his mother as a child, but this first year we were together he ‘adopted’ my mother and gave her a card and a little present. My mother must have really felt she had lost a son and gained another one. In fact she once said as much, saying she felt George was the son she had once aborted before marrying my father. George didn’t know quite whether to take this as a compliment or an insult, and in later years tended towards the latter theory.

 

Sadly, in the early hours of my birthday, March 20th, my grandmother died in hospital. It is strange how dates play a significant part in my life. My best school friend, Michael, had also died in hospital on my birthday, and a cat we had for 15 years had an operation to remove a tooth on my birthday, and died soon afterwards presumably from the after-effects of the anesthetic on such an old cat.

 

About a month after my grandmother’s death,  my grandfather died, saying to my mother the night before: ‘I think I’ll go and find Mum’ (which was how he often referred to his wife.) Soon afterwards, when all their affairs were sorted out, my mother came back to Bradfield Court and we all lived together.

 

In early April George left the British Film Institute. I seem to remember he had to leave because of staff changes in his department, but he soon found another job working in Moss Bros, the high-class dress hire firm in Covent Garden. He started there at the end of May.

 

On Easter Monday we went to the fair on Hampstead Heath, and later in May George took me to Hastings for the first time to meet his old friend, Rose and his partner Neil.

 

We went down on the Tuesday and stayed till the Saturday. My mother came with us, staying elsewhere in the town, and I have photos of us all at Fairlight Glen, a beauty spot near Hastings, and in the lovely town of Rye where we went on the Friday.

 

Rose and Neil’s flat was an antique dealer’s paradise. Neil had lived in the rented maisonnette, on the upper two floors of an old Victorian house near the railway station, for many years. During that time, and even earlier, he had accumulated a treasure trove of valuable antiques and mementoes of years gone by. He little seemed to realize the value of half the things, which were just every day objects to him.

 

Their flat was always a muddle, but almost everything you picked up was a relic from a bygone age. It was almost like stepping back in time. There were pre-War comics in mint condition and their annuals, all full of what would now be regarded as very non-p.c. storylines and pictures. There were also packages of products not on the market for decades, and chocolate boxes dating back to the 1930s. Two whole rooms were crammed full of ‘junk’, much of which was valuable. A lot of the furniture was antique, and when they offered you a hot water bottle it was the old ‘stone’ type. They had two matching earthenware washbasins and jugs sitting on top of a marble-topped unit, and numerous other objects from another era which sat incongruously alongside modern appliances like the TV and fridge.

 

The main living room was dominated by a huge painting covering most of one wall, in a heavy frame and illuminated by a special light. It depicted hunting dogs alongside their dead game. It had been painted by Neil’s uncle who was a famous animal painter and sculptor.

 

The sad thing was that many of these paintings were neglected and deteriorating. A circus scene in tapestry format ran all around Rose’s bedroom, but the unframed canvas was just held to the wall with drawing pins. A hunting tapestry suffered a similar fate, and sections of both tapestries were to disappear over the years, perhaps hidden away in a box or possibly lost forever. There were quite a few other unframed canvases lying around, as well as several framed ones. There were also animal sculptures (one of a dog used as a door-stop), and a sketch of a famous coastal view from Hastings’ East Cliff looking towards the Firehills and Fairlight Glen. Their flat is still much the same today, over 30 years later, except one of the junk rooms upstairs has been converted to a bathroom to replace the old bath in the kitchen, VCRs, a CD unit and stereophonic TV have arrived, as have two fridge-freezers, both half empty. One broke once, so they bought a new one and then had the other repaired at a later date. All the old antiques remain too, and if ever they move and have to dispose of some of their possessions, they could surely raise a fortune. They sold one painting, an Arctic scene of Captain Scott’s sleigh-dogs, at Christies a few years ago.

 

Neil is very conservative in character. At the time we visited in 1971 he worked for the Ministry of Defence. Rose then worked as a porter in an hotel. He was as camp, outrageous and extrovert as ever. They were as different as chalk and cheese, a complete contrast of personalities.

 

Even though my mother was with us, on our visit to Rye Rose insisted on going into every cottage (toilet) en route round town. Their dog, Cindy, obviously knew this route well because she was running ahead on her lead and turned into each cottage without any prompting. My mother remarked that Rose must have a weak bladder.

 

During 1971 we acquired two kittens. We bought Dixie on or around my birthday in March. George and I went up to Club Row Market, Shoreditch and chose him from a cage full of little tabby kittens, all climbing over each other. Dixie made the trip with us down to Hastings once as a kitten. Some time later my aunt and uncle arrived at our flat unannounced with 4 or 5 of their six grown-up children, and a tabby and white kitten.

 

All of their family were 6 foot tall or over, including the women. None of them had met George before, and so my aunt said to him:

 

‘We are a bit overwhelming when we all arrive at once, aren’t we?’

 

Dixie never took to this dramatic arrival of Dinky, and from then on adopted a strategy of trying to starve the intruder out. Dixie would regularly gobble down his own meal and most of Dinky’s before the slower eater had hardly begun. We had to feed them separately until Dinky learned to hold his own. They gradually tolerated each other, and even got quite friendly, giving each other a wash, but I don’t think Dixie ever quite got over what was to him Dinky’s unwelcome arrival.

 

During that Spring and Summer George, my mother and I took regular weekend walks along the Regent’s Canal towpath from Camden Lock to Regent’s Park, where we sometimes had a boat on the lake.

 

An entry in George’s diary for July says simply ‘Margate’, so this might have been the first time we took him to my childhood seaside resort for a day out. My mother, brother, myself and our grandparents used to go year after year, till Jean the seaside landlady moved out of her seafront guest house to Cliftonville. We did stay in that guest house once or twice, and indeed George stayed there on a visit for old times’ sake with my mother and myself for one or two nights.

 

Jean was a very warm and friendly person who called everyone ‘lovey’. George took to her instantly when he met her. However, there was a rather coarse sister, Elsie, who was working at the Margate house one year when we arrived with my grandparents. My grandmother did not think her at all suitable to be serving at tables with children and adolescents like myself and my brother, for she was making crude comments about ‘a bit of the other’ all the time. One year, at the Cliftonville house, my mother remarked on the nice potted plants. Jean’s daughter remarked: ‘Yeah, me’n’Elsie nicked ‘em from Butlins’ (who had some hotels down the road).

 

This ‘daughter’, if indeed that is what she was, arrived suddenly one year as a tiny baby at the Margate house.

 

‘One of the visitors left her, lovey,’ said Jean in explanation, leaving the rest to the imagination.

 

At the end of August George took me up to Scotland to meet his family, and during our stay we visited one of his childhood seaside resorts, Ayr. It was a cold and windy day, but we had a paddle and visited Robbie Burns’ cottage. We went into a photo booth and had some romantic pictures taken of us holding hands and kissing.

 

He also showed me his favorite Scottish city, Edinburgh, where we climbed up the big hill known as Arthur’s Seat together. He took me on his favorite walk, along the stream down by Dean village. Of course we also saw Princes’ Street, the Royal Mile and the Castle.

 

Most of our time was spent in Glasgow. We stayed with his sister Betty and her husband and six children. It was bedlam. They lived in Easterhouse, a huge post-War housing development on the Eastern fringes of the city. His other sister, Margaret, lived in the Western suburb of Drumchapel, another post-War housing scheme. Margaret and her husband had five children.

 

We went on a one-day coach trip to The Trossachs while we were in Scotland. It was very picturesque, and we came home with some lovely photos. Loch Lomond, just northwest of Glasgow, was another beauty spot George first showed me on this visit.

 

As well as his sisters and their large families, I met several of his aunts, including his Aunt Rose, who looked after him when his father died, and Aunt Beeny, who had lost one or two fingers in an accident years before. George showed me all the sights of Glasgow, including the beautiful Kelvingrove Park near the Art Gallery and University, and Barrowland, a big market, where there was a mussel shop George loved. You could go in and order a plate of hot mussels.

 

We were there just a week on that first visit, but we packed a lot in. The week after we came back, according to George’s diary, we made another one day trip to Margate. So that Summer we each introduced the other to places we knew and loved in our childhood days.

 

In October I took George to the London Palladium to see Country singer Slim Whitman. In these early years George also tried to introduce me to opera. It has to be said, however, that our tastes in music rarely coincided, and sadly George stopped going to the opera and classical concerts in later years. I always regret not being able to share his love of classical music.

 

However, in many things we shared similar tastes. Also in October a play came on TV starring Patricia Hayes as ‘Edna, The Inebriate Woman’. We both loved this study of a down-and-out bag-lady, played brilliantly by the veteran comedy actress. In later years George wrote a pilot sitcom TV script based on his own experiences and people he met when sleeping rough, and the central characters were two bag ladies. George suggested Patricia Hayes for one of the two central characters, remembering her portrayal of Edna. His script was rejected by many TV companies, but some time later Patricia Hayes and Pat Coombes starred in a TV sitcom about two bag ladies, one of whom carried a Harrods shopping bag. This had been in George’s script, which we thought was much better that the ones produced by the TV company’s script-writers. So George’s idea, the two central characters, the Harrods bag and Patricia Hayes all made it successfully to the TV screen, but George got no credit for it whatsoever, just a very rude letter telling him not to re-submit his script (even though he had previously been told by various TV companies that his scripts were well written).

 

During the first two years we were together George introduced me to Jean Frederick’s ‘Drag Balls’ at the Porchester Hall, near Queensway. These were theatrical events featuring some fabulous ‘drag.’ There would be a competition for the best costume, and plenty of music and dancing.

 

I remember the first time I saw George in drag - I was stunned. He looked so beautiful. He had small features, and in drag with make-up and a wig, he looked like a real woman. He had gone to his friend Roy’s place in Notting Hill to drag up, and when I went there to meet him to go to the ball, I did not know what to expect. He looked very nervous as I walked into the room, but was visibly relieved when I was so astounded and pleased with his appearance. I think I fell in love with him all over again - the nearest I have experienced to falling in love with a woman. Through the disguise I could see his eyes full of the familiar tenderness and love he showed towards me - they were truly the windows to his soul. He verbally reassured me that this female incarnation was in fact still him, my George, but I did not really need this confirmation. I would have known and loved him/her in any guise.

 

George kept his drag hidden away in the wardrobe in our bedroom. It was to lead to an end to the honeymoon period between George and my mother. She discovered the drag one day, and George never saw her in quite the same light again. If her snooping caused her distress she had brought it on herself.

 

At the time an old friend of George’s, Marlene, used to come with me to my rock’n’roll club most weeks. As she lived in Southeast London she used to stay the night at our flat sleeping on the couch, and go home the next morning. My mum got upset about this too, and kept on about what the neighbors would think. It was quite ironic, since she had made such a big point about George being my ‘brother’ rather than my boyfriend, having a girl to stay overnight should have allayed any suspicions as to the true nature of our relationship. Logically she should have made sure the neighbors saw Marlene leaving early in the morning, but in my mum’s eyes her son having a girlfriend stay overnight in her council fact was little better than having my boyfriend living in with us. It was a row over Marlene staying overnight that eventually caused us to leave Bradfield Court and find a flat of our own.

 

When my mother discovered George’s drag, he led her to believe it was Marlene’s clothes which she left there to change into after going rock’n’rolling with me. However, not realizing George had told her this yarn, I put my foot in it as usual by telling my mother the truth: that they were George’s clothes which he wore when going to the theatrical drag balls.  I do not think George ever forgave me for spilling the beans, as it confirmed my mother’s worst suspicions and strained the relationship between them.

 

At the end of 1971 we were, however, still living with my mother at Bradfield Court. That was the first Christmas we actually spent together. For New Year we went to a party at the Hammersmith flat of a gay ex-colleague of mine from my days at CND headquarters. So ended our first full year together.

 

The next year George left Moss Bros and came to work with me at Post Office Overseas Telegrams, as they were then called. We rarely saw each other as he was sent on different training courses, and ended up in a different building altogether.

 

Because we both worked shifts, we often came in very late from work. My mother could not handle this situation. If we were not due in till 9pm, she still insisted on cooking the meal at 5 or 6 pm and keeping it hot for us. Consequently it was all dried up by the time we came to eat it, and she complained about her meal being ruined and all the hassle. She just could not get into the habit of having hers and leaving us to cook ours when we came in, or all eating late.

 

We tried to lend a hand with the housework, and even worked out a rota so Mum would not be left with all the work. It was never successful, for if we were doing the washing up or vacuum cleaning, Mum would interfere and criticize, and ended up taking over and doing it herself. Finally, there was the big row over Marlene staying the night regularly. My mother made it quite clear it was her flat, that she was worried about what the neighbors would think, and that she did not want to risk losing her council tenancy. I shouted up the stairs after her that if she felt like that George and I would move out to a place of our own, and eventually, that is what we did.

 

Another big upset was when we were all going out for the day, and my mother, for some unknown reason, decided to take George’s pet budgie, Joey, down from his hook on the ceiling and put him on the floor of the airing cupboard with the door ajar. She said she was worried about him catching a chill at it was a cold day, and she thought there was a draft from the door to the balcony near his cage.

 

Our cats were always looking longingly at Joey’s cage, and Dixie in particular was determined to get him. On several occasions we had found him clinging to the cage from the ceiling, having jumped up there from some piece of furniture. When we came home from the day out, poor little Joey was dead in the bottom of the cage. Although he had no claw marks on him, obviously the cat had gotten to the cage and tormented him, scaring the poor little thing to death. My mother swore she thought she had left the cats locked up in another room, but George was heartbroken and never forgave her for this. He believed she did it deliberately as she did not like budgerigars very much. Whether there was any truth in this, or she was just a bit forgetful, it was a terrible blow to George, who had already lost his beloved cat when his former flatmate, John, shoved him out on the streets to fend for himself. George also had the terrible memory of his stepbrother cruelly squeezing the life out of George’s pet hamster. Now my mother, through her carelessness, had killed the only remaining pet belonging to George before he knew me. It was not to be the last pet of ours whose death she caused. She claimed only to have acted out of the best of intentions, to keep Joey warm and snug on a cold day, but the end result was tragic and did not improve the relationship between George and my mother.

 

In late February 1972, George’s sister Betty came down to London for the first time, and stayed with us for about a week. Her teenage neighbor, Catherine, came with her, and also Betty’s youngest child, James, who was then a baby in a push-chair. Catherine longed for children of her own and doted on ‘wee James’. We took them around the sights of London, and established a monotonous routine which continued for nearly 20 years. We would ask Betty what she would like to see, and the reply was always the same, an apathetic:

 

‘I’m nae bothered. It’s all one.’

 

I remember on that first occasion coming off the bus or Tube at Westminster and George pointing out the tower of Big Ben, but Betty was much too preoccupied with wee James to even cast a glance at the famous clock tower and Palace of Westminster. On this and subsequent visits over the next two decades, Betty would regularly come down to London with a succession of ‘wee weans’ (pronounced 'wains') as she called them (‘screaming brats’ in our parlance). When her own children grew up she brought her grandchildren instead. Betty was not really interested in seeing any of the sights, or at least she gave that impression, but insisted on dragging an endless stream of brats round St Paul’s, the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace and the rest even though most of them were too young to appreciate it. The truth be known, Betty was only interested in going round the shops for tacky little souvenirs for the folks back home, and the ‘weans’ were only interested in chips, crisps, sweets and ‘ginger’ (Glasgow slang for all soft fizzy drinks) or anything else they could cram into their greedy little mouths to rot their teeth, clog their arteries and set them on the road to heart disease.  All food was rejected unless it was fried in a pan full of grease and accompanied by equally greasy chips. A roast joint of meat with potatoes, vegetables and gravy was looked upon with horror by the ‘weans’ as some nasty foreign meal they would only eat under sufferance, picking at it for about an hour so you knew how much you were torturing them by depriving them of their usual Glasgow sausage (i.e. hamburger) and chips.

 

On Easter Day that year George, my mother and I all had a day trip to Weymouth on the train. It was one of many cheap rail excursions we went on, known as ‘Merry Makers’. They were tiring but exceptionally good value for money. Torquay was a day trip we did several times, and we went as far afield as Aberystwyth, Llandudno, Blackpool, the Lake District and even Edinburgh on day trips by rail over the years.

 

In September of 1972 the three of us had our first holiday together, staying in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. We toured the island, and on one occasion were late for dinner because we tried to climb up some cliffs from the beach. George and my mother started panicking half way up, since they were steeper than they looked.

 

It was on this holiday I met up with the mother and father of Michael, the schoolfriend who had been killed crossing the road. We had called round at their North London address one day and been told they had moved to the Isle of Wight. It was easy to trace the Czech name beginning with a Z in the Isle of Wight phone book. I had not seen Michael’s parents since he died, 12 years previously, so we wrote and arranged to visit them whilst we were on holiday. We then kept in touch for several years, visiting each other, writing and phoning, till Michael’s father died and I lost touch with his mother, who was talking of marrying again. I think she probably found the memories I invoked too painful, for that was the reason they moved to the Island in the first place, to get away from people and places associated with their long lost only son.

 

The day after we got home from holiday George went to the last night of the Proms with Roy. He probably would have much rather gone with me had I shared his love of classical music.

 

Trips we made that year included a visit to Kew Gardens, the Blackpool illuminations and a ‘gay riverboat shuffle’ from Tower Pier past Putney and back.

 

Round about this time, late 1972, we started making a regular date of Sunday lunchtimes at ‘The Black Cap’ pub in Camden Town. A drag artist named Marc Fleming, or ‘Auntie Flo’, used to appear there, and sometimes he was joined by Mrs Shufflewick, another female impersonator who had been quite famous on the radio. Marc was not everyone’s cup of tea, but we loved him. He was in his fifties and amply built, and used to play to a packed bar every week. He had an acid tongue, but it was all part of his act. His fans came along just to be insulted.

 

Coachloads of foreign tourists would be brought to the pub, and Marc used to joke that the couriers charged them a fee to see ‘an old English poofter on stage.’ It was probably true. Even Barry Humphries was spotted in the audience by Marc one Sunday, who pointed him out to everyone, saying:

 

‘Look, there’s Barry Humphries taking notes so he can steal my act.’

 

Dressed in a dark suit and a trilby hat, Barry laughed at the joke, but quite a lot of his Dame Edna character, especially where she insulted the audience, was like a toned-down Marc Fleming.

 

The things Marc said on stage were often unrepeatable, which is probably why he never got a wider TV audience and became famous like Lily Savage. He could never have done his act on TV in those days. As it was he often got kicked out of pantomime for going too far, or swearing on stage in front of the kids. He not only insulted his audience, but politicians and the Royal Family, at a time when the latter were very rarely criticized or lampooned. If anyone was foolish enough to heckle Marc, they got more than they bargained for. A woman heckling him was like a red rag to a bull. Quick as a flash came the retort:

 

‘Shut up you fucking, bucket-mouthed, hairy-arsed lesbian. When I say “shit” jump on the shovel.’

 

Hardly a politically correct jibe nowadays, and even then some people felt very uncomfortable. Marc always managed to be topical, and one week Golda Meir, then prime minister of Israel, had been visiting West Germany and was featured on TV news with Chancellor Willy Brandt. Marc’s quip about her going to Germany to pay the gas bill shocked many in the audience, who may not have appreciated the deeply satirical nature of this remark. Marc was himself Jewish, and the joke probably reflected his disapproval of Israel becoming so friendly with Germany. 

 

The Royal Family came in for regular mockery: ‘Princess Anne - the horse dressed up as a woman’, ‘Prince Charles - the next Queen of England’, the Queen Mother  ‘clad in black motorcycle leathers and a crash helmet with a bunch of wax cherries attached doing a ton up the High Street on her motorbike, smashing all the red traffic lights with a hammer’ as she went, ‘a terror for a woman of 76' were typical Marc Fleming caricatures. Everything ‘Spitting Image’ later did, Marc had pioneered years before.

 

We took Rose’s partner Neil to see Marc one week, and he was not at all amused at the lampooning of the Queen and her family, which was just beyond pale as far as he was concerned.

 

His partner, Rose, loved Marc, despite being sent up. Rose is a very big man, of similar proportions to the late Marc Fleming himself, and on one particular occasion was wearing a scarlet jumper, check trousers and his usual spectacles. We deliberately took him up the side alley, through the Gents’ toilet so we would emerge near the front of the stage. We pushed him forward, and of course as soon as Marc Fleming spotted our friend he stopped dead in his tracks, pointed to Rose and said ‘I see Billy Bunter’s arrived.’          

 

Favorite quips of Marc included: ‘That’s a nice dress, love. Did you get tired of the curtains?’ ‘Do they still do hairstyles like that in (e.g. Peckham)? It doesn’t suit you, dear - you should have it combed forward over your face.’ ‘There’s two men with beards down there. I like beards, but they bring my arse out in a rash. Why don’t you get together, do a 69 and get lockjaw?’ ‘That frock suits you. I do so admire a woman who can wear black. Been dead long?’ ‘Is that your (wife/girlfriend/boyfriend) or just the weekend joint?’ The punchline for anyone who looked hurt or embarrassed was: ‘I’m only joking dear, same as God was with your mother’.

 

The Almighty regularly came under mild attack: ‘Isn’t she camp, that God, sitting up there on a cloud all day....’ There was a dog on the premises owned by the manager or one of the staff, and it too became a butt of Marc’s jokes: ‘It’s all wrong you know, that big butch dog sitting out in the alley tethered up with a string of pearls.’

 

You either loved Marc, or you hated him. His double act with Mrs Shufflewick was also popular, though Shuff liked her drink and often forgot her lines. Marc would then say: ‘That’s another gag you’ve fucked up for me.’ But he was really very protective of Shuff, and off-stage was a very nice person. He had a boyfriend, Joe, who was very quiet and shy, but who was sometimes persuaded to sing a few numbers. He specialized in Al Jolson songs (without the black make-up), and he had a wonderful voice very like Al’s. They were not dissimilar in looks also (Joe, like Al, was white).

 

Marc and Joe were often invited back to lunch or dinner by members of the audience, who knew they would be sent up the following week. ‘I went back with that queen in the corner last week,’ Marc would say, pointing out some squirming figure trying to hide behind someone else. ‘“Come for Sunday lunch”, she said to me last week. Sunday lunch? A tin of fucking Spam, dear.’

 

We loved our Sundays at ‘the Cap’. We sometimes saw my gay cousin in there as he was also a great fan, and once his two straight sisters were with him enjoying the show. Then one day we read in the gay press that Marc had died, I believe of cancer. It was a terrible shock and a very sad day for us, and all Marc’s fans.

 

Earlier in 1972 there had been a big UK tour by my favorite singer, Jerry Lee Lewis. I followed the tour around the country as far afield as Coventry and Liverpool, and dragged George and my mother along to the early show at the London Palladium, then left them to go home whilst I went into the second house. George was not overly impressed, but did say he thought it appropriate that Jerry ended his act that night with ‘Old Rugged Cross’, as it was a Sunday and Jerry calls himself a Christian.