1. THE YEAR WE MET

We met on Thursday September 10th, 1970. I was due on night shift at Overseas Telegrams, but instead stayed on at England’s oldest cinema, The Biograph in Victoria.  Little known by the general public, this establishment was a gay meeting place for many decades, and most gay men did not go there to see the films.

 

On this particular occasion, George had actually gone especially to see a film called ‘The Group’. I sat next to him, and that is how we met. After the film ended I asked if he would like to go for a drink, he told me he did not drink, but I persisted and invited him for a tea or coffee. We went over to the buffet on Victoria station, and after a chat we agreed to meet again the following Sunday. George lived nearby in Pimlico, and he wrote his address down on a piece of paper I gave him. I tore it in half and wrote my address on the other bit. The fact that nearly 22 years later I have the two pieces of paper in front of me as I write proves how much this first meeting meant to both of us.

 

I think it was on that first day we met, while he waited with me at the 24/29 bus-stop outside Victoria station in Wilton Road for my bus to Camden Town, that I told him I had just come back from a holiday in the Soviet Union. I remember telling him proudly how everybody had TV sets (a symbol of affluence as I saw it), and George was unimpressed and remarked that TV was an easy way to spread propaganda to brainwash people. Our political differences had already become apparent.

 

I went round to his room in Belgrave Road on the next Sunday as arranged. I knew he shared with someone, but never found out till after he died that in fact it was John’s room and George was the lodger rather than the other way around. ‘Tom the Cat’, which I always thought was George’s, actually belonged to John, and George had a budgie called Joey. John had tactfully gone out for the evening, and I sat on the bed whilst George pottered round his little room making tea and cooking me a meal. I am ashamed to say I cannot remember what he cooked, but I know I started falling in love with him that evening.

 

He told me John was staying with him for protection because he was afraid of some people he had become involved with. It was a mysterious political group, who he told me later had on occasions hypnotized him whilst he slept. He was obviously very worried by this group, and was in poor health due to the stress. There was a history of heart trouble in his family, and at the time I met him George was attending the National Heart Hospital regularly because he suffered from palpitations.

 

Although it was John’s room and not George’s, what he told me was essentially true. During our 21 years together George told me a lot about his earlier life, which I will describe later on. When I met him he certainly was frightened to the point of paranoia by this sinister group of people, only one of whom George ever positively identified to me. I never found out exactly what the group was, but according to a letter George wrote his sister years before I met him, which she showed me after his death, George feared this group was part of some KGB plot to destabilize the government and ferment revolution.

 

When George told me about how these people were threatening him (I cannot remember if they had actually used violence against him or not), I just wanted to protect him and make him feel secure. I told him later this was the moment when I knew I loved him, and he replied that this emotion was pity, not love. He was wrong - it was much more than pity, though obviously my heart went out to him when he told me how scared he was of these people. My reaction, however, was not just one of pity, but of knowing I loved him and wanted to be with him as much as I could, so no one could hurt him again. The seeds of our love grew from there.

 

That these seeds ever took root and flourished seems to be a miracle, because at the time we met, when George was paranoid about anything vaguely leftwing and Communism in particular, I was a paid-up member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and attached to an unofficial Stalinist faction fighting ‘revisionism’ in the Party.

 

When George came to see me for the first time at my mother’s council flat in Camden Town, he was horrified when he saw my room. Not only had I painted it in violent orange and black colors, which were evidence of my disturbed mind at the time, but the room was a pseudo-religious shrine to Stalinism. Soviet propaganda posters lined the walls, and on the back of the door were black and white tapestries of Lenin and Stalin, with Soviet medallions and badges attached. The centerpiece of the little room was a dressing table draped with a red Soviet flag, on which stood a bronze statue of Lenin and a volume entitled ‘The Collected Works of V. I. Lenin’. This tableaux was meant to be an atheistic altar to Communism.

 

After seeing this room George must have wanted to cut off all contact with me, suspecting I was another member of this group trying to get close to him. Yet, in a way, the fact that I was so open about my political beliefs may have convinced him I was not a member of this clandestine group, who would surely have hidden their motives in order to gain his trust. They would more likely have used someone who claimed to be non-political or a Conservative, rather than a raging Stalinist fanatic.

 

For the whole 21 years we shared together George kept appointment diaries, which proved invaluable to me in writing this book. They list trips abroad and other events, and also thousands of cinema and theater visits, for we went at least once and often twice a week or more. Only the more memorable films, plays and shows are mentioned here.

 

We met again at Victoria on the Tuesday, and must have gone into the buffet again or somewhere similar, as I wrote him the next day about ‘holding hands secretly beneath the table’. We then walked round to a council estate at the back of the station, where he kissed me under a tree. I was wearing an awful 1930s style dark green raincoat which, George said, made me look like ‘the Third Man’ in the Orson Welles film. The raincoat was ideologically correct since it was made in the People’s Republic of Hungary (my principal reason for buying it), and in the spacious pockets I had a half-pound box of chocolates hidden away. Not until the evening was over did I suddenly produce this present, and I gave it to George as we said goodbye and arranged our next meeting. He told me later that it had touched him deeply how I kept this box of chocolates in my pocket the whole time. Whether they were edible, or had melted into a sticky mess, he never said.

 

The next day I wrote him my first love letter, and he wrote back expressing similar feelings towards me. We were meeting at least three times a week, and the first film we saw together (apart from ‘The Group’ at the cinema where we met), was ‘The Battle of Britain’. George told me many years afterwards how he hated it. I could not sit through it now myself, my tastes having changed so much during the years I shared with George, who taught me to appreciate good films and plays. Any films about war or violence I now usually avoid like the plague, unless they have a strong anti-war message.

 

George took me to Leicester Square to see the Paul Maslansky film ‘Eyewitness’, starring Mark Lester as the sole child witness to an assassination. My education in good direction had started. On Tuesday 29th, 21 years to the day before he died, he met me in the evening outside my work and I took him home to meet my mother for the first time, and he saw that awful bedroom shrine to Communism.

 

Nevertheless, he wrote me another letter the following day saying how much he enjoyed coming to my home, and how welcome he felt. He praised my mother, and told me how his own mother died when he was 10. Over the years he saw another side to my mother he did not like so much, and this caused problems.

 

George was usually very direct with people and said what he thought, and most of his friends either took his advice or ignored it, but were not offended because they knew it was his way. All his life he was afraid to speak like this to my mother for fear of hurting my feelings, but he told me I should criticize her when she was insincere, or too dependent on others, which he considered two of her main faults. All this came much later though, at first he took my mother at face value and was very fond of her. I think he always respected her intelligence, but was annoyed by her ‘dependence mentality’ and tendency to pretend she liked things in order to please others. These faults prevented her doing what she really wanted and realizing her full potential. I did try to give her advice along these lines, and my mother agreed these were indeed two of her character weaknesses. George was always very perceptive, and was thus able to help people to help themselves if only they would listen. Alas, few did.

 

In the letter he also said how much he needed me emotionally, and that this was so much more important than the sexual aspect of our relationship. This proved to be so true over the years, for as the physical side of our relationship subsided (we were never really sexually compatible), our emotional bonds grew stronger than ever. We cuddled a lot and shared a bed till the very end, and never stopped loving each other, but sex did not enter into the relationship in the end, and was never important even at the beginning.

 

After he died, I found out from one of our friends that George was unemployed when he met me, but quickly found work . He told the friend, a gay guy known as Lena, that he had done this because he had met a wonderful person. He got a job with the British Film Institute in Dean Street, Soho, for I met him there several times after he finished work.

 

One Sunday I met him in the afternoon at Embankment Underground station (then confusingly called Charing Cross), we walked across Hungerford Bridge, and he introduced me to the National Film Theatre, where we saw the Eisenstein classic ‘Ivan the Terrible’. I remember being enthralled by the superb direction, with the long shadows and atmospheric sets. Of course, it was also an ‘ideologically correct’ film for me to see at the time, which made me pay even more attention to the film’s finer points. Another film we saw soon afterwards was Peter Sellers in ‘I Love You, Alice B. Toklas’, a satirical farce built around Gertrude Stein.

 

One day I asked my mother if she would mind George staying the night, i.e. sharing my single bed, and that gave her something to think about, but she finally agreed. She did not really have much option, because I had already left home two years previously and had only agreed to share a flat with her again if she accepted my lifestyle. Had she refused my request, she knew I would simply move out again.

 

In November we saw ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’, ‘Scars of Dracula’ and ‘Horror of Frankenstein', the latter two being more my choice. It would be some time before our tastes in films started to coincide, though I did appreciate the anti-war message of ‘Western Front’. My mother came with us to see the two horror films, for George wrote me a letter the next day saying how much he enjoyed the visit to the cinema with us, that he was not a sophisticated person and that simple, elementary things gave him the greatest pleasure and satisfaction. He also said I ‘must never think that I might be bored by your company’. This was not just him patronizing me - he always retained a love of classic horror movies.

 

According to that letter, the first time he stayed the night with me at Bradfield Court was the previous weekend. He wrote about how he enjoyed being with me, ‘especially waking up on Sunday morning and feeling you, not just beside me but part of me, in a way that nothing or no one can destroy.’ He wrote of his fears that I would tire of him, which was like a threat hanging over us. ‘And then you started to wake up gently, then smiling while you were still half-asleep, you kissed me, and I felt that I had nothing to fear - that we would always be as we were then - united by something stronger than time, stronger than habit, stronger than imperfections.’ He was right. Although our beliefs and tastes were so different at the time, our love was strong enough to draw us closer and closer together, and ultimately proved stronger that death itself, for he continues to care for me from beyond the grave.

 

George received quite a culture shock on Saturday November 21st when I took him to a 1950s-style rock’n’roll revival club frequented by Teddy-boys and leather-jacketed rockers. It was held in a hall attached to a pub called ‘The Fishmongers Arms’ (or ‘The Fish’) in Wood Green, and was at that time called ‘The Hound Dog Club’ (‘Hell’ being the previous name). That night the club was particularly packed as American rocker Gene Vincent was appearing there. George never liked crowded places at the best of times, and I pushed as near to the stage as I could with George in front of me, whilst everyone around was pushing, shoving and going mad. George told me afterwards he would never come with me again, and accused me of screaming in his ear like a silly schoolgirl all the way through Gene’s performance. He also said Gene looked ill, and the show seemed to be a great strain on him. He was absolutely right. The next time Gene was scheduled for a tour, a year or two later, I turned up at the venue to find the show canceled. Gene had died suddenly of a perforated ulcer.

 

On his visits to our flat in Bradfield Court George brought various gifts, such as a plant, and making his own ice cream became a specialty of his. We watched TV, played records, looked at photos, and read poetry together, among other things. George used to write poems, all of them very sad. He never wrote one about me, because he said he could only write poetry when he was unhappy, about depressing things like death, hardship, lost love, and so on. He felt too happy about our relationship to be able to compose his kind of melancholy, but beautiful, poetry.

 

Poor George also had to indulge in board games like ‘ludo’ with me and my mother. No doubt he was thankful the day after one such visit to escape such inanities for a midday concert of music by Bartok and Shostakovich.

 

He tried to instil some sense of culture and the arts in me, and one day, after seeing the Christmas illuminations in Regent Street, he took me (and my aunt) to see ‘La Boheme’ at The Coliseum. Sadly, although I enjoyed some of the arias, I could never really understand classical music or opera, and George stopped going himself eventually, partly because of the high cost of tickets. It is ironic that we only met another gay couple who were also great classical music lovers a few months before George died, or he might have had many years of concert-going with friends who shared his appreciation of fine music. However, he did teach me to love the theater and good films, and introduced me to some of the great writers.

 

On December 9th I wrote telling him I had just been reading all his letters of the three months since we met: ‘They are wonderful, the most beautiful letters I have ever received in my life and I shall treasure them always.’ I wrote about how much I loved him, and how sex was only a small part of it. ‘The most wonderful thing in the world to me is to see you smile’, I told him, and it was true till the day he died. I then went on to write about our right to be together, even though society did not formally recognize gay relationships. I expressed the wish that we could live together permanently, which was to come true much sooner than I imagined. On the following Friday he was visiting me and then taking my mother to see the opera ‘The Barber of Seville’, and in the letter I thanked him for this, and for letting her sometimes come along when we went out together. Whether I did not join them at the opera because I was on night shift, or because one of us decided I would not like it, I cannot now remember.

On Christmas Day 1970 I was due to be working at the Telegraph Office, but my grandmother created such a fuss I had to swop my shift, and so I spent what proved to be our very last traditional family Christmas with my grandparents, mother, brother, aunts and uncles in Welwyn Garden City, where my grandparents rented a bungalow. George always hated Christmas (not least because his mother died at this time of year when he was very young), but he told me he was spending it with friends. In actual fact he was in his bed-sitter trying his utmost to ‘ignore’ the ‘festive season’.

 

It is strange, but the only two occasions George spent Christmas Day alone at home in London and I spent it with my mother in Welwyn Garden City was the first Christmas after we met (1970) and the last one before he died (1990). He never met my grandmother, but he did speak to her briefly on the phone when he rang me there on Christmas Day. I remember my grandmother saying she was glad I had met a friend. She no doubt realized how lonely I had been in my teenage years, but I don’t know if she knew I was gay. A few days later my grandmother, who was 84 and in relatively good health, slipped and broke her hip whilst trying to reach a saucepan on a high shelf in the kitchen, and she never fully recovered.

 

The hip mended in hospital, but the accident accelerated the aging process and she seemed to lose the will to live. Dementia set in, and my mother had to give up her job and stay in Welwyn Garden City to look after her. It was during those first three months in 1971 that George, at my mother’s invitation, moved into Bradfield Court permanently ‘to keep me company’. He brought Joey, his budgie, and his favorite Picasso ‘blue period’ print which he always said was quite valuable, a bargain he had bought in Paris when he lived there for several months. I wondered at the time why he never brought ‘Tom the Cat’, but apparently the ginger tom belonged to his flatmate, John. Sadly, when John moved out of the bed-sit he shoved Tom out of the window to fend for himself, and when we found out we rushed over to the flat in Belgrave Road calling for the cat from the street, but we couldn’t find him.

 

At the end of his 1970 diary is a page where George seems to have tried to write down things we could perhaps share, do and go to together. These included films, Speakers’ Corner, Operetta, Spiritualism, voluntary work and visiting gay bars.

 

On New Year’s Eve George came over and we saw our first New Year in together. It was to be the first of many, and being Scots, Hogmanay meant much more to George than Christmas.

 

We had made it to the end of the year, yet there was a time when we almost did not. Soon after we met, George was due to call round at my place one Sunday, but failed to turn up or phone. I panicked, feeling I would never see him again, and just had to get over to Pimlico and find out what was wrong. I feared he was fed up with me, or something dreadful had happened.

 

When I arrived I managed to get in the main front door and up to his room, where I knocked and knocked on the door and shouted:

 

‘George, it’s Tony’, but all to no avail. I became desperate, and then George’s flatmate, John, arrived.

 

‘Do you want to see George?’, he asked, ‘He’s in there.’

 

John opened the door with his key and let me in, and there was George, either asleep or pretending to be, on the bed. He told me he was not feeling well, and after asking exactly what was wrong with him, I immediately rushed out to a nearby chemist to get him some medication. I believe he described the symptoms of flu, but I am sure he had been scared off by my Communist fanaticism, probably thinking I was indeed part of the sinister group he was so anxious to escape from.

 

He told me later that the way I rushed over and became so genuinely concerned when he said he was ill, even going to get him some medication, proved to him that my love was real. I cannot help thinking what might have happened to both of us had I not gone over to Pimlico that Sunday, and had John not turned up when he did. Certainly both our lives would have been very different, probably much sadder, and I doubt either of us would have traveled the world separately as much as we did together. Would I today still be ignorant of the theater, and know only the cinema of the present-day equivalents of James Bond, Dracula and the ‘Carry On’ series? Would George have survived the stress of fighting sinister forces alone, and the heart palpitations this was causing him to suffer?