2. BACK TO OUR ROOTS - EARLY CHILDHOOD

George was born in Glasgow on May 27th, 1943. His birth had been induced by an air-raid, for when a bomb fell at the stroke of midnight at the end of the street, his mother started going into labor. George was born two and a quarter hours later. It is reported that his screams, as he was pulled protesting into the world, frightened his mother more than the air-raid sirens.

 

George wrote that the circumstances of his birth explain why he was essentially a nocturnal person, only coming alive at night. Also his abhorrence of war, and why he silently screamed whenever he heard an ambulance or police car siren.

 

Just under two years later hundreds of miles away in the Middlesex Hospital, just off London’s Oxford Street, I was born with a club foot, hare lip and cleft palate, disfigurements which could well have been caused by the shock of a V2 exploding, which caused my mother to almost lose the baby when she was just three months pregnant. I was born on Tuesday, March 20th 1945 at around 10pm Double British Summer Time. On the Sunday, whilst my mother and I were still in the hospital, another bomb blew all the windows in. A few weeks later the war in Europe ended. I too have always had an abhorrence of war, and even as a child (when conscription was still in force in Britain) I told my mother I would never go in the armed services, even if I had been considered medically fit. Even then I was determined to go to prison rather than do National Service.

 

George always retained memories of the end of the War and the immediate post-war years, which helped to make him seem a generation older than me, although there was less than two years difference in our ages. He was also the youngest of his family, whilst I was the eldest of a slightly later generation in my family. He remembered the remains of the railings with most of the iron removed to melt down for ammunition, ration books and sharing an air-raid shelter with three outraged hens. Apparently they never laid eggs for George never tasted such luxuries till he was six years old. Until then they only had powdered eggs, for which George developed a passion which lasted all his life. They only became available again in this form a year or so before he died, and he eagerly bought some powered egg to re-capture this ‘treat’ from the distant past.

 

One of George’s earliest memories was of a sense of panic in a passage-way as his mother appeared to be attempting to suffocate him, whilst he screamed louder than the air-raid sirens. One of George’s elder sisters later told him this had happened during Glasgow’s final bombardment of the War when a bomb blitzed the buildings directly opposite them. They had been visiting an aunt and had to shelter in a passageway two tenements away from their own home. His mother was hysterically crying out:

 

‘We’re going to be buried in rubble,’ as she protected baby George with her own body from the falling debris. His sister retained an equally vivid memory of this incident, ‘for she suffered the pains of jealousy and rejection at being excluded from the security of my mother’s all-powerful protection, in favour of a spoiled screaming brat’, to use George’s own words. He was still bawling two hours after the All Clear, resentful of his mother’s attempts to stop him from breathing and seeing, while his sister also nurtured resentment at not being protected in this way. This ‘grew into open antagonism as we became rivals and arch-enemies, feuding deviously as our characters developed through those formative years.’

 

George suffered from terrible childhood nightmares, and became a frightened child. He was scared of nuns, who ‘took on the proportions of black vampire bats as soon as they approached’, and he was also frightened of other boys. He describes being taken to the cinema at the age of seven, and being terrified, presumably by the darkness, the hugeness of the place and the usherettes’ torches. His sisters tried to subdue him with sweets, but ‘a giant sized close-up of Googie Withers sneezing in “White corridors”' started him screaming so loudly he had to be rushed out of the cinema by his embarrassed sisters and taken home. Later he became used to the cinema, with its perks of sweets, ice-cream and soft drinks, for his mother was an avid Bette Davis fan. George remembers being horrified ‘by the way the actress smoked endless cigarettes - which to this day I view as a most horrible habit.’

 

He always remembered the first full length program he saw at the cinema, a double-bill with films entitled ‘Lights Out’ and ‘Bedtime for Bonzo’, the two titles of which he often used to run together and say to me as we prepared to go to bed. He wrote of the second film: ‘I only remember being hypnotized by the performance of the chimpanzee - not the monkey who was later to become President of the USA.’ (Ronald Reagan.)

 

George’s mother must have been as straight-speaking as George was, for he remembers them visiting a cinema near Glasgow’s Charing Cross where his Aunt Lily, whom his mother detested, worked as a part-time usherette.

 

‘Did you like the film, Elizabeth?’ asked Lily in her pseudo-posh accent at the end of the performance.

 

‘A damn sight better than I like you,’ was his mother’s retort, hurriedly dragging him ‘away from the awful aunt as if she had the plague’, as George later wrote about the incident.

 

George and his family lived in a very closely-knit community in Glasgow’s Partick area. It was a working-class district of tenement blocks, and Crawford Street where they lived has now been demolished completely. All his aunts, uncles and cousins seemed to have lived in the same street, so they all grew up together as one big family.

 

By contrast my own family was spread all over London and the Southeast. My first two  homes were in the relative affluence of West Hampstead - a reflection of my father’s successful restaurant business. My father was always a very distant figure. He was in the restaurant till midnight, then went to Greek-Cypriot clubs gambling, wining (rather than winning), dining and womanizing. He would come home in the early hours and sleep till midday or longer. I rarely saw much of him, so it is little wonder I grew up speaking only English, whereas my Greek-Cypriot cousins brought up in London also speak Greek. My chauvinistic father thought it was my mother’s job to teach her children to speak Greek - the fact that she only spoke a few words of it herself did not, apparently, excuse her from this task. Certainly my father could not teach me, as he was never around. I did pick up a few words and phrases, but soon forgot these once my parents separated when I was six.

 

One of the Greek-Cypriot touches in our flat was jars of olives, which were always in the sideboard. I developed a taste for them, and whilst I always called them by their correct name, I just could not pronounce the name of my Aunt Olive. One day it dawned on me the two names were the same, and I asked my mother: ‘Why does Aunty Loive have the same name as olives?’

 

Occasionally my father would come home drunk at 2, 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning with some friends and demand my mother get me and my brother out of bed as he wanted to have a party. She always refused, and often got beaten for this defiance, and for not having enough food and drink in the house for a party. On another occasion he started packing away their best china on display in the cabinet, given to them as a wedding present. He said he needed it as a christening gift for a friend and he would buy a replacement set, but he never did. Once when my mother asked for some housekeeping money he told her to ‘go down Piccadilly and earn some’. She never got back money she lent him to buy his first restaurant (previously an old eel, pie and mash shop in Walthamstow). When he sold it at a profit and she asked for her share, he said she had eaten it in the meals she had whilst working there. Once, when my mother told him his sister-in-law was fiddling him out of money in his restaurant, he told her: ‘Yes, she is a good business woman. Why can’t you be like that?’ These anecdotes about my father are endless. One of my favorites is the War-time Public Health Inspector who discovered horsemeat in the fridge in the restaurant, and my father feigned shocked surprise that the inspector should even entertain the possibility my father was serving it up to customers. ‘It is for the staff, they like it’ he told him, and got away with it.

 

My mother left my father in 1951 after a friend told her that a planned holiday in Cyprus was not all it seemed. Apparently my father had bought only one-way tickets for my brother (born in 1949) and myself, and was determined we should be brought up in Cyprus. My mother was particularly worried about me because I needed constant hospital treatment and operations for my leg, lip and palate, for which I was under specialists at the Middlesex Hospital. Another factor in the separation was my father’s continuing violence towards my mother, particularly when he was drunk. So we went first to a refuge in Fulham, and then spent a few weeks with my mother’s eldest brother, his wife and large family in a village called Sutton Valence, near Maidstone in Kent. My Uncle Fred was the village policeman, and the little police station was attached to their home. The house and garden were full of children and pets of all descriptions. My brother became very ill whilst there and suffered recurring fits, which they thought at the time was due to epilepsy. He had to be hospitalized and kept under observation, but in actual fact he had eaten some Bella-Donna (Deadly Nightshade) which grew along the country lanes. One of the hazards of city children suddenly finding themselves in the countryside. I kept quiet about this for years because I and my cousins had all been out with him on that day, and had done nothing to dissuade him from eating the poisonous plant. He kept picking all sorts of leaves from the hedgerows asking us if they were OK to eat, and we just kept saying ‘Yes’. I still feel guilty to this day.

 

My mother’s younger brother, Len, and his family used to live with my grandparents in Wood Green, but moved to Wembley, where he too was a policeman, whilst my mother’s younger sister, Olive, was a career woman who lived in various bed-sits and apartments in South London. After a few weeks in Kent, we moved in with my grandparents in Bowes Park (originally part of the Queen Mother’s Bowes-Lyon estate apparently) in Wood Green. This became the place I now think of as my childhood home, even though we were only there six years. My grandfather had also been in the police, but now worked for the civil service locally, whilst my mother and grandmother both worked at the local Metal Box factory.

 

My earliest recollection of the cinema must have been while we were still in West Hampstead, and it was a Western. I just remember isolated scenes such as a Red Indian dying of a stab wound, a cowboy being eaten by a crocodile or alligator (my mother explained it was really a dummy, not a man, being eaten), and prairies being set alight to halt the pursuers. It does seem a particularly violent sort of film for a young child, and I have never since seen alligators in a Western.

 

My mother also used to take me swimming at an indoor bath in Finchley Road (now long gone), so I learned to swim at an early age. George, by contrast, was once thrown in the deep end by some boys and almost drowned, but managed to swim to the side. He never swam again in his life.

 

Other places I remember going in the first six years of my life include what must have been one of the first supermarkets in London - John Barnes foodhall in Finchley Road. I vividly remember coming down an escalator from the ground floor of the department store into the foodhall where the latest hit, ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, was playing over the tannoy. We also went to one of London’s first launderettes, further up Finchley Road. As we sat watching the washing go round, the machine suddenly went into a spin and the washing was pushed to the side of the drum by centrifugal force. My mother panicked and went up to the attendant to ask where her washing had gone. Through the window of the machine it appeared to be empty, and my mother thought her washing had gone somewhere else to be rinsed or dried, and that she had to go and collect it. Both these incidents were in the late 1940s or very early 1950s.

 

Other early memories of mine include dancing to Khachaturian’s frantic ‘Saber Dance’ in our West Hampstead living-room. Goodness knows what the people in the flat underneath thought. My mother is convinced my later devotion for 1950s-style rock’n’roll can be traced back to this manic bopping to Khachaturian’s noisy, frenzied piece, which remains a favorite of mine to this day. Another of my favorite records of the time (late 1940s) was ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ which we also had on record, and which I thought at the time referred to a little baby. I did wonder why a baby with little or no hair needed to borrow someone’s comb.

 

Memories of my days in Bowes Park are still quite vivid. Unlike electrically-lit Hampstead, the street was still illuminated by gas lamps, though while we lived there they removed these and replaced them with concrete lamp-posts and orange sodium electric lighting. However, I still remember the lamp lighter who lived down the road, with a red-painted lamp-post outside his house to indicate this was the key lamp for our street. When he lit this lamp, all the rest came on. The milkman still delivered by horse and cart, as did the coalman, emptying sacks into our cellar coal-hole. There were left-overs from the War such as ration books for things like sweets and sugar, and at the corner of the street were square, pale green pig-bins into which everybody put their potato peelings, etc.

 

In those days families had enjoyed sole occupancy of houses for years, and we knew all our immediate neighbors and many others up and down the street. I can still recall their names and the houses they lived in, yet today I could not tell you the surnames of any of my neighbors.

 

We had what seemed like a huge garden, but in reality it must have been a narrow, overgrown strip. A concreted, canopied yard with an outside toilet led to a narrow concrete path on the right which went to the end of the garden. The end nearest the house consisted of a lawn, flower-beds and lilac bushes, whilst the upper part was a jungle of gooseberry bushes, beyond which was an apple tree and a hen coop where we sometimes found new-laid eggs. My grandfather would come in from the garden and tell us about some flower that was in bloom. When my Mum and grandmother said they hadn’t seen it, he’d show them where it was - inevitably up the jungle end hidden by a gooseberry bush!

 

Gradually, in the mid 1950s, the character of the street began to change as families moved out and new occupants moved in to what were now becoming flats and bed-sit accommodation. A Polish woman studying to be a doctor moved into an upstairs bed-sit next door. The poor woman could not concentrate on her studies with my brother and me screaming and shouting in our garden, so she used to lift the sash window, poke her head out and say in her slow, sing-song, thick Polish accent: ‘You-oo muh nor shou-ow’. Because of this she got called ‘Mrs Do-not-shout’ by us, and we found her performance so amusing that we deliberately used to go out into the garden and scream our heads off just to see and hear her entertain us in this way. My poor brother always got the blame, apparently his voice carried more than mine, so when we ran into Mrs Do-not-shout on the escalator at Bounds Green tube station when returning home with our mother one day, my brother Philip did a runner and was waiting for us when we got home, in case our neighbor complained to my mother about what a bad boy he had been. One day my grandfather told my grandmother he had just discovered this poor woman muttering to herself at the end of the garden the other side of the wall behind our hen house. He thought she must be saying her prayers, but in actual fact she used to take her medical books and study them there - the only place she could find peace and quiet.

 

Downstairs a black family from Barbados moved in. Although apprehensive at first, my grandmother became the best of friends with them and used to baby sit in their house, coming back to tell us about exotic Barbadian recipes like souse.

 

Mrs White, who had previously lived next door, was an enormous Cockney woman who was always leaning over the brick wall in Norman Evans style. From one point she could peer over this wall right into our kitchen, and she complained to my grandmother one morning that her husband had been late for work because our kitchen clock was slow. One day the whole White family packed their belongings into a removal van to go to a New Town. I can still see ‘Ma White’ and her brood waving from the back of the van, and so I lost one playmate, their son Alan.

 

I still had Clive though, an impish little lad who was always getting into mischief. Most people thought him an awful boy, but my grandmother had a soft spot for him. He once threw a rake at me which badly injured my leg, but we remained the best of friends. I also unintentionally injured the finger of a rather posh boy named Ashley who lived opposite. This was due to a silly prank involving a deck chair.

 

One of Clive’s favorite pastimes was using the square pig-bin lids as sort of massive gongs, bashing them against the external wall of the house on the corner until the deafening reverberations caused the occupants to come out and complain. One day a lot of the kids in the street went missing, and my mother caught us up on her bicycle as we were about to cross a busy main road. I had decided to lead them, Pied Piper style, to my favorite park about a mile or so away, and we had taken all our toys along with us. On another occasion my mother gave me money to buy her some cigarettes (children were allowed to do this then), and I forgot all about it. Finding the money in my pocket I put it down to ‘a miracle’ and treated all the children in the street to sweets. On another occasion I was not so flush, and went into Kitty’s sweet shop with a lump of coal I had found and tried to exchange it for sweets. She was not impressed with my claim that the coal was really valuable because I had seen ‘Superman’ squeeze a similar piece of coal into a diamond on a friend’s TV. Opposite Kitty’s was a filthy pet shop with a smelly water rat in a trough outside. Other exotic ‘pets’ included a monkey, which my brother unsuccessfully badgered my mother to buy him. We had to settle for ‘Admiral Jellicoe’, a tabby cat we promptly renamed ‘Specs’ because of his eye-markings, and which lived with us in four homes till it got terminally ill at the age of 13.

 

Clive and his mother over the road used to go on holiday to a bungalow in Maldon, Essex, and they described it in such glowing terms we decided to go there one year, with my mother’s brother Len and his family. It had been described as a lovely bungalow with a large hut in the garden which would sleep several people. There was a brook at the bottom of the garden, and the sea was nearby with huge boulders on the beach. My uncle took his family down by car, then came back to collect us. He was not overly enthusiastic about the place. ‘It’s not exactly the sea’, he explained, ‘more like a river estuary, you can see the other side’. A neighbor was supposed to be looking after Specs, but was nowhere to be found, so we put him in a laundry basket and took him with us. Halfway there my mother noticed my brother Philip had tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘It’s all right’, he said, ‘it’s just that the cat is scratching my legs.’ He was sitting in short trousers on the laundry basket for lack of room, and had been afraid to complain of the cat scratching him through the air-holes in case we turned back home instead of going on holiday.

 

Actually it might have been better if we had. My mother had broken her arm, which was in plaster, so my aunt had to do most of the housework. This was enough to cause tension, but in addition to this the accommodation was not all it was cracked up to be. In actual fact it was two ramshackle huts in a field with no running water, electricity, gas or sanitation. Cold water had to be obtained from a solitary tap in the middle of a field, shared with dozens of other families. We had Calor gas and oil-lamps, and a smelly Elsan toilet which Len had to empty. The ‘brook at the bottom of the garden’ was the sewage ditch where these Elsans were emptied. The River Blackwater was aptly named with thick black mud when the tide was out, and the ‘boulders on the beach’ turned out to be huge bomb damaged chunks of sea wall with rusted pieces of twisted iron protruding from them. We never discovered the actual town and beach of Maldon itself, a mile or two away, which was apparently quite charming. One member of our two families loved it though - Specs spent much of  the two weeks exploring the cornfield beyond the sewage ditch.

 

We were very lucky in that we usually went on a fortnight’s holiday every year to Margate, whilst even our cousins living in Kent could only afford a day out there once or twice a year. We went to the same boarding house every year, right on the sea front. There was no running water in the rooms, but Jean was a cheerful woman and used to bring up huge jugs of hot water every morning. We all loved the place, as well we might. George and his family only got day trips to Rothesay, sailing down the River Clyde on the Waverley paddle-steamer. However, his family did have a television early enough to enjoy the first soap featuring the Grove family, whereas we never had a TV till the very end of the 1950s.

 

With my cleft-palate and club-foot, I underwent a lot of operations during my childhood. They straightened my foot and closed the hare lip soon after birth, but it left me with one leg shorter than the other, a fixed right ankle, a scar on my upper lip, a cleft palate and associated dental problems. In 1951, just after we had moved in with my grandparents, I was running outside to meet my Dad, who was visiting, and I slipped on the wet tiles of the front pathway and broke my bad leg. I had to stay in hospital for six months with my leg in traction, lest I should lose any more length from the injured right limb, already several inches shorter than the left one.

 

Consequently I missed a lot of schooling, and so my mother and grandparents decided to send me to a private school for a year to catch up. ‘Beaumaris School for Girls’ was a local institution which took boys up the age of seven I believe, and was situated in a big old Victorian house and run on Victorian lines by two elderly Victorian spinsters. ‘Playtime’ consisted of sedately walking around the garden in line doing lady-like exercises: ‘hands on head, arms stretched out either side,’ and so on. Numerous cats freely wandered around the school, jumping up on desks whilst we were having lessons. The day always started with a reading session from Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ books, which introduced me to them and made me a firm fan, collecting all the books in the series. Punishments included going down to the cellar with a coal scuttle to collect fuel for the fires, and crawling up the stairs on your hands and knees. I remember we had to observe a minute’s silence in the classroom when King George VI died.

 

This school certainly helped me catch up on my missed education, but whether attending a predominantly girls’ school had anything to do with my later homosexuality or not, it certainly did not get me used to mixing with men. My father had always been absent and so I had been surrounded by women since birth, brought up by my mother, doted on by waitresses and women cashiers in my father’s restaurant, and surrounded by female nurses in hospital. My grandmother was a very dominant woman, and my grandfather very quiet. All the men in my life were distant and hostile. I had seen my father in a drunken temper, smashing our furniture when he discovered we were leaving him. Male doctors and surgeons in hospital had always been associated with painful examinations and operations, and my grandfather was a distant, rather frightening figure who scolded us for damaging his garden. After I left Beaumaris and went to the local Bounds Green Junior School I was in a woman teacher’s class, but the following year was due to go into a male teacher’s class for the first time. I cried and cried and did not want to go to school, so terrified was I of men, with whom, at the age of eight, I had never had any close contact. Eventually I got used to the male teachers, but was always a very lonely child.

 

Then, when I was about 9, a boy in my class befriended me. I think Michael saw I was lonely and decided to be my friend. He was like that - a cheerful boy with a lovely personality. He became my best friend for years both in and out of school. While other children mimicked the way I talked (a muffled nasal tone because of my cleft palate), or called me ‘Hop-Along-Cassidy’ or ‘Hopadopoulos’ because of my Greek name and bad leg, Michael was always kind and considerate and made me laugh. He too had a strange foreign name, beginning with a ‘Z’, because his paternal grandfather was Czech, so perhaps that helped draw us together. There were not that many foreigners in London’s outer suburbs then. Later Wood Green became a thriving Greek-Cypriot community with a Greek-Cypriot Mayor of Haringey at one time, but my brother and I were the only children with Greek names at Bounds Green School in the early 1950s.

 

Around 1950, when George was about seven (according to his sister, though George sometimes puts it later), his mother died. It was Christmas time when she was taken ill, but George was not told. All he knew was that she was missing. He was given toys, but knew something was wrong. His father made George say a prayer for his mother, after which he cried and cuddled the boy. George was not used to this show of emotion from his father. ‘Did this sudden closeness contribute to my subsequent homosexuality?’ muses George when writing about these events.