14. KAMBALA ESTATE

Kambala was one of the last council estates to be built in Wandsworth, planned by the last Labour council, and it was a low rise, pleasant estate with gardens and courtyards. We hoped to get a ground floor flat with a garden, but were very disappointed to be told these were reserved for old and disabled people. Most of these were simply not capable of doing gardening, and absolutely hated the thought of a garden. The builders were still on site, and loads of pensioners and disabled people in the ground floor flats begged paving stones off the builders to cover up their unwanted gardens, which some of us in the upstairs flats envied and couldn’t bear to see disappearing under concrete. You would have thought the council could have asked who wanted gardens, as there was plenty of space in the courtyards to give gardens to some of the upstairs flat dwellers, whilst some of the ground floor flats could have been designed without gardens. Years later the courtyards were overgrown with weeds, rundown and neglected. Of course, I now realize I should have qualified for a ground floor flat because of my disability (a club foot at birth resulting in one leg shorter than the other and the need for surgical shoes), but I didn’t think of myself as disabled so it simply didn’t occur to me to mention it. Anyway, we did feel safer upstairs, and less likely to be burgled, especially during our many trips abroad.

 

We viewed the upstairs flat which we eventually moved into, and although it was a lovely flat, because it didn’t have a garden or even a balcony we refused to accept it at first. George had a strange feeling as he walked around it that unhappy things would occur there - perhaps he sensed that he and several of our cats would die there. Anyway, after initially walking out of the estate office saying we’d have to think about it, we eventually retraced our steps and said we’d take it. I’m sure we did the right thing, as it was an even better flat than we had before, with a huge kitchen and plenty of cupboards.

 

We got the keys the following week and moved in on a Monday in January 1984. The council were paying for the removal, but the company they used were rather careless and broke our dressing table mirror, for instance. Thankfully George and I had packed some of our more delicate things in a shopping trolley, and I walked over to the new flat with the cat. I had to wait ages before George arrived, as he stayed to see the men put everything we wanted to take in the van. We were leaving our old suite and several other things, and buying some new stuff. The council gave us a certain amount of compensation for the inconvenience of the compulsory removal and for some of the resulting expenses.

 

George arrived, and we waited in the empty flat with no furniture for hours till the removal men finally arrived. They had decided to take a long lunch break right in the middle of our move!

 

The next few weeks we were busy getting straight, buying carpets and curtains, fixing a bathroom cabinet, etc. It was to be the last home we ever had together, and the best. In the next 7 years, thanks largely to George, we really got it looking nice.

 

The Kambala estate at that time was a maze of alleyways, which were later nearly all blocked off as it was considered a muggers’ paradise. We disagreed, and thought the alleyways were marvelous, since you could come and go so many ways. It was useful when we brought someone back to our flat we had met in ‘The Cricketers’ several times. We went down so many back alleys he could never find the place again on his own, which was why we did it. It was one of the few times I have met someone in a gay bar (rather than a backroom or darkroom of a gay bar) and gone back with him, but this guy was so bold he came right up to both of us and invited himself back to Jay Court, and later, to our new flat. He was very attractive but we felt he was not entirely trustworthy, hence our caution. We saw him a few times, but then he disappeared when ‘The Cricketers’ ceased to be gay.

 

No sooner had we moved into our new flat than we had a visitor from Glasgow. George’s nephew, John, was doing a cookery course at the Hotel Forum in Kensington and paid us a short visit. He had never been to London before, and he and his fellow trainee cooks were wandering around posh Kensington trying in vain to find a ‘fish supper’. Not finding a fish and chip shop they contented themselves with raiding the mini-bars in their rooms, not realizing they had to pay for these drinks before they left.

 

One Sunday in February we invited Ray and Vic, the landlord and landlady of ‘The Cricketers’, round to lunch to see our new flat and discuss the possibility of our doing a drag show, but they left the pub soon after and it went straight. They’d only been in the pub a year and had really turned it around to one of London’s most popular gay venues. It was a shame they couldn’t stay there, but I believe there were problems with the lease.

 

George was by now working at Oxfam, a charity which was to be a main part of his life during the next few years. He was really suited to the work, starting off helping out in a shop just off Carnaby Street. He never got full recognition for his efforts, mainly because at the crucial time when he might have been offered a shop manager’s post which could have led to paid employment at Oxfam, he left to go back to the Australian company we had once both worked for. I know he regretted this decision later, but at the time he thought it was for the best.

 

Among the outings we had in March were a visit to the Lyric, Hammersmith to see ‘Rents’ and a preview of ‘Starlight Express’ at the Victoria Apollo theater. The Lyric play about rent boys caused one woman to walk out early on muttering that it was ‘filth’, presumably thinking when she booked it was something to do with tenants paying rent to landlords. ‘Starlight Express’ was a technically amazing production with roller skaters coming right out over the audience on specially constructed tracks. During March we also heard Ken Livingstone and Des Wilson speak at two separate meetings at Battersea Arts Centre. These meetings were about saving the Greater London Council and about a Freedom of Information Act. We also saw our friends Lena and Frank that month, and caught a coach from the Victoria Embankment for a long weekend in Amsterdam. We made so many short visits to Paris and Amsterdam I can’t recall details of individual trips, but we always enjoyed ourselves in these two cities.

 

After an Easter at home which included a visit to the fair at Hampstead, we were off on our travels again in mid-May. We caught a double-decker ‘luxury’ coach, complete with hostess, coffee and sandwiches, to the South of France. We traveled by coach and ferry all that day, right through the night, skirting round the center of Paris, and going through Lyon. It was a good job we brought food and drink with us, for we didn’t see any sign of the hostess on the upper deck until the afternoon of the second day, when she tried in vain to sell us sandwiches which by now were quite stale. We’d seen them taken into the coach nice and fresh in London, but the lazy cow had let us starve for 24 hours before she got off her butt and tried to get rid of her stale stock just before arriving at our South of France destination!

 

When we did arrive it was raining. This more or less set the pattern for the week. Having stayed at George’s sister’s caravan in Scotland a couple of times, we had decided to go on our first foreign caravan holiday. It seemed a cheap way to see the South of France. Our caravan site was in Antibes, and as we trekked across the muddy camp site (which fortunately had paved roads) we discovered our tiny caravan was as far away from the entrance as it could be. Alongside the perimeter hedge beyond was a country lane. We had expected a caravan similar to Betty’s, which had a separate bedroom. Instead we squeezed into a tiny space hardly big enough to swing the proverbial cat. When the beds were down there was barely room to move, and the rain on the roof kept us awake for hours. At least we were able to step out on to relatively solid ground, but the caravan opposite seemed to be in the middle of a swamp, and the occupants had to step gingerly on to wooden planks to get to dry land.

 

Despite the bad weather, we enjoyed our holiday. Graham Greene had a home in Antibes, though we never saw it or, indeed, Mr Greene. We caught buses from the site into town, where a train ran conveniently all along the coast into Italy one way, and probably into Spain the other way. Our favorite town in the area was Nice, where we discovered the ‘Flunch’ chain of self-service cafeterias. These were confined to the South of France at the time, but later moved northwards to Paris, and we always used to visit the ‘Flunch’ there too. We loved self-service restaurants as you could see what you were getting before you ordered, and you didn’t have waiters hovering around you. It was really essential for George, as he was so fussy about what he ate. It was impossible to eat in any place where he couldn’t see and smell the food before ordering. One whiff of onion or garlic and he was likely to be physically sick, and the sight of any kind of sauce, or ‘muck and squalor’ as George so delightfully put it, and he wouldn’t touch the food. The Nice ‘Flunch’ became our second home, so we made daily trips to Nice to visit it. We certainly couldn’t be bothered trying to cook meals in our tiny caravan, so the cafeteria was a Godsend.

 

Nice itself was a pleasant city with pretty gardens, wide boulevards, fountains, a very wide, long promenade with a stony beach and at one end a high cliff with gardens and a water cascade. The palm trees gave it all an exotic look, even in the rain. There was also an old quarter with steps and narrow winding streets which we liked very much.

 

We took the train to Cannes, where the film festival was in full swing. This meant, ironically, there wasn’t a film to be seen for the ordinary tourist like us, since all the cinemas had been taken over by the industry, and tickets were unavailable to the general public. We hated Cannes. You could not even go on the sandy beaches since they were all private and mostly attached to hotels. So unimpressed were we with the town, I haven’t got one picture of it in our photo album.

 

One day we took a train along the coast to Monte Carlo. We spent a lovely day looking round the principality. We saw the palace guard in their strange uniforms outside the palace, and visited the yacht harbor, where George posed with a yachting cap, making out he had a boat moored there. We also found the Casino, and I took George’s photo outside. It was quite a nice day, and eventually we stumbled upon the Monte Carlo beach which amazingly (unlike Cannes) was a free public beach. It was a lovely bay of soft sand, with palm trees and very few people. I went in for a swim - it was cold, but at least I could say I went swimming in the millionaire’s paradise of Monte Carlo!

 

We then caught the train again to go further east back into France for a few miles, and then across the border into Italy and the town of Ventimiglia, a haven of cheap booze, especially Italian vermouth. We bought several bottles before catching the train back through Monte Carlo to Antibes.

 

The longest trip we made was an all day journey by train west to Marseilles, a town George had always wanted to visit since seeing the Marcel Pagnol ‘Marius’ trilogy of films. Once there we visited the waterfront marina, where George again posed in his yachting cap in front of the yachts, and we made the pilgrimage up the big hill to the cathedral overlooking Marseilles and the harbor. Well it certainly felt like a pilgrimage, as it was quite a climb.

 

We only had a short time in the city, but we liked what we saw, and took a lot of photos. There were some marvelous buildings, sculptures and fountains, and in my album there is a very sexy photo of George wearing a light colored jacket, jeans and a check shirt sitting on a fence in front of the big neo-Classical cascade fountain and sculpture. Whenever George wore certain clothes, especially a denim jacket with tight jeans, I got turned on, but then I have always been a clothes fetishist. Naked bodies do very little for me, and let’s face it quite a few are better covered up. I actually prefer fully clothed male models in clothes catalogs to naked ones in porno mags, though I suppose my ideal erotica would be a partly exposed model.

 

Later on in Marseilles we found a little sandy beach, and George sat overlooking it whilst I went for a swim. We also had time to make our way to the head of the harbor, where there was a good view of the city. All too soon it was time to catch the train for the long journey back to Antibes.

 

Two days later we caught the coach back to London. It had been an interesting trip, despite the poor weather and primitive accommodation, and it gave us a chance to see the French Riviera.  It was not a place we would want to rush back to, however. Marseilles was perhaps our favorite memory.

 

We traveled back mid-week, and the late May Bank Holiday weekend followed. George was working at Oxfam on the Saturday, but on the Sunday, his birthday, we went down to Hastings to see our friends Rose and Neil, coming back on the Monday. Then George had two week’s paid work at Austral Development, where we both used to work. When George left our friend Angel replaced him, and she was on a fortnight’s holiday. George fitted in his voluntary Oxfam work when he wasn’t doing Angel’s shift.

 

We saw another production by the Bloolips drag revue company in June. President Reagan visited London that month, and there were some protests which we certainly sympathized with, if we didn’t participate. I saw his helicopter fly low over Hyde Park as I was swimming at the Lido in the Serpentine one day. Ronnie and Nancy were staying in Battersea House, a 10 minute walk from where we lived. This river-side house was very convenient for Battersea heliport, from which the President could be whisked to any part of London within minutes.

 

That weekend the GLC, about to be abolished, had a last fling with a Festival for Jobs, and the following week George went to Oxford for an Oxfam meeting. We went on the Gay Pride march at the end of the month, and the weekend after on a sponsored canal walk organized by CND. It was a very long walk indeed, starting somewhere in central London, all along the canal towpaths and the banks of the River Lee to Lea Bridge. George dropped out near the River Lee at Victoria Park and caught the bus back home. We had a more relaxing day trip to Brighton in July.

 

In August our friend, neighbor and my work colleague, Angel, had her anniversary party with her husband Doug. I had met her originally on the rock’n’roll circuit with her second ‘husband’ Charlie. Angel had a very complicated love life: she had apparently been a very happily married middle-class housewife living in Oxfordshire until she suddenly decided to run wild and came to London. She’d had three children by her fist marriage, and then had three children by Charlie, a gentle Teddy-boy. I believe he also came from Angel’s part of the country, and he used to wear his drape jacket everywhere even in the 1970s. We often saw him and Angel shopping in Clapham Junction Tesco’s together, Charlie in his full Teddy-boy suit. We only discovered years later than Angel had never married Charlie, and eventually she dropped him and married Doug, another Teddy-boy. Later still she was to settle down with Red, a rocker very much into motorbikes. Doug and Angel had a real rock’n’roll wedding with most of the guests wearing Teddy-boy and Teddy-girl clothes. I didn’t go to the wedding for some reason, but a big photo of it hung on their wall. This photo had been featured in a magazine article about their wedding and lifestyle. When Angel moved on to Red this picture was censored in true Stalinist style to eliminate the bridegroom non-person from the picture.

 

Angel’s tastes seemed to change along with her partners, and once she met Red she had little time for Teddy-boys anymore, it was all bikes, motorcycle runs, leather gear and the 59 Club, a rockers’ club started by a vicar in 1959.  Charlie confided to me once that Angel only pretended to like rock’n’roll, but really hated the music, screaming for Charlie to ‘turn that bloody row off’ when he played his records at home. This would certainly make sense, as she was never in the room where the records were playing at any of her parties, and she never danced to rock’n’roll at gigs, just the occasional slow number. I think she was far more into the guys who like rock’n’roll than the music itself. She was also into the clothes, making and wearing flared skirts and all the rest of the gear. She had peculiar ideas about British rock’n’roll being the best, and had little time for Rockabillies, who preferred the genuine American original music.

 

The August Bank Holiday we also spent with our friends Rose and Neil in Hastings, going down Friday and staying till the Monday. The two of them used to go boating on the Norfolk Broads every year, with Neil’s sister, her husband and their son. On one such trip Neil struck up an acquaintance with a woman named Ena, whose family owned a string of pubs and hotels in Norfolk. Ena must have been pretty naive, for she didn’t seem to cotton on that Neil and Rose were a gay couple, even though Rose is the campest creature on Earth. A romance developed between Ena and Neil, and at one point they were planning to get married. Rose was rather upset by all this naturally, but put it down to a senile phase Neil was going through in his old age. Later Rose and Ena became very good friends. I think for Neil it was nice to get a bit of attention and to be looked after by Ena. Rose was lazy and would never cook meals or fuss over Neil like Ena did. Of course the fact that Ena’s family owned a string  of Norfolk pubs was undoubtedly part of the attraction, and indeed Neil found temporary summer time work in one of the hotels they managed in Great Yarmouth for years after Ena died. They never got married in the end, but I remember going down to Hastings when she was there and they behaved like a couple of love-struck teenagers, chasing each other around the flat.

 

I can’t remember the first time I met Ena, but it must have been sometime in the early 1980s. I went down to Hastings a day or so before George, and Ena not only refused to call me by my name, she directed all conversation to me via Neil, asking: ‘Would Rose’s gentleman friend like a cup of tea?’ (She used Rose's real name, not his camp one.)

 

Of course Ena took over the kitchen completely. She did not seem to mind the mess, putting it down to two men living on their own without a woman’s touch. I can’t remember things improving very much whilst Ena was staying there though, to be honest. When George came down Ena referred to him as ‘Rose’s other gentleman friend’.

 

George had no time for Ena at all, especially when she insisted on cooking some foul concoction with curry powder in it, which stank the whole flat out. George and I hated curry, so he went into the kitchen to investigate the horrible smell and to tell Ena he couldn’t eat ‘that muck’, but she ordered him out saying: ‘I can’t have men in my kitchen’. Well, it wasn’t her kitchen to start with, and George soon put her right about the gender question. Ena had a horrible dog called Becky which snapped and barked whenever anyone came near. Ena used to say: ‘She doesn’t like men.’ George decided to put Ena straight, so in response to one of these remarks about men he replied: ‘there’s no men in this flat, dear’. This seem to perplex her, but George soon made sure she got the message. He sent Rose a very camp card on his birthday which could leave Ena in no doubt Rose was gay, and she apparently broke down in tears and said she didn’t want to come between Rose and Neil or spoil their relationship. I think that is probably the moment they all agreed to remain just good friends, and Rose’s relationship with Ena took a turn for the better. She became very ill soon afterwards, and eventually died. Rose took great care of her in the last days, visiting her at the hospital in Norfolk. He seemed to take more care of her than her own family did, and after she died tended the rather neglected grave whenever he went up to Norfolk.

 

On this particular visit I can’t remember if Ena was there, but whenever she was she would change her dress about three times a day. She and Neil would get up, then she’d change to go to the pub for a lunchtime drink, change again when she got back, and change again to go to another pub in the evening. She wore a lot of make-up, and had her hair in ringlets. George said she looked like Bette Davis in ‘Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?’ and he wasn’t far off the mark.

 

In October I went up to Barrow-in-Furness for a national CND demonstration against Trident, but I can’t remember if George came with me. We saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘Mother Courage’ at The Barbican in November, and I remember how much I enjoyed this production compared with the amateurish avant garde Edinburgh Fringe Festival performance in that canteen. We also paid our annual visit to a Dorothy Squires concert that month, this time at Wimbledon Theatre. December saw us on a demonstration and march to the Soviet embassy, and also at a rally in Trafalgar Square marking the anniversary of the arrival of Cruise missiles in the UK. Another year came to a close, this time without a New Year’s Eve party.

 

In February we attended a public meeting at Battersea Labour Party headquarters on the sinking of the Belgrano. This was the meeting where Tam Dalyell MP made some very strong remarks indeed about Margaret Thatcher. George attended an Oxfam area conference at Westminster Cathedral in March in his new role as shop leader of the Chelsea Oxfam shop in the King’s Road, which was a voluntary position. We also went on a CND vigil outside the Belgian embassy which I presume was something to do with Cruise missiles. CND seemed pretty active that month as we also went on an anti-Cruise vigil on Clapham Common and helped out at a local CND jumble sale. Even at the annual Easter Parade in Battersea Park, which we attended, the local CND had a stall. In mid April we were off to Portugal for the first time, with my mother. We were to spend a week on the Atlantic Coast at Estoril, a short train ride from the capital, Lisbon.

 

It was only a moderately successful week, mainly because the weather was rather dull and overcast with some rain, a fact my mother never let us forget. We were all sharing a room in the hotel (to save money) and very early in the morning my mother would wake us up by trying to creep to the French windows leading out to our large balcony overlooking the sea, in order to open them up and have a cigarette. Every morning she seemed to trip over something in the semi darkness and exclaim ‘Oh shit’, which woke us both up. We then pretended to be asleep hoping she would keep quiet, but it was always the same routine. She would open the curtains and window, light up her cigarette and say: ‘Cloudy again, duck. Don’t think we’ll see the sun today.’

 

It was like an accusation: ‘You’ve brought me all the way out here when I’d have been happier in Margate. Where’s all this sun they are supposed to have in

Portugal?' Perhaps it wasn’t meant that way, but that’s how it came across to us, and it was most annoying. The last thing we wanted to know at 7 a.m. in the morning was that it wasn’t worth getting up because the weather was so horrible.

 

Of course, most people holiday on the Algarve in the South of Portugal, but the Atlantic coast is always cooler. Also, April is very early in the year to expect summer weather. However, we were very near Lisbon and could catch a train just across the road, so we made several trips there and enjoyed exploring a new capital city.

 

One thing which surprised us were the number of beggars about - it was almost like being in a Third World country. Yet the main streets were paved with very ornate tiles which gave them an affluent look. In the central area was an old iron tower housing a lift which led up to an observation platform and a high level walkway, which was unusual. Otherwise Lisbon was a typical Continental capital, with its streetcars, large squares, and an old district of narrow winding streets called Alfama. There was also an area called Belem which had quite an impressive monument to sailors on the waterfront, and on the way into Lisbon by train you passed under an impressive suspension bridge across the river, and on the far side could be seen a smaller-scale replica of the huge statue of Christ which overlooks Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

 

Whilst in Portugal we paid a visit to Sintra, an old town set on a hill inland, which is very picturesque. Tourist buses go there, but we made our way by local bus which was much more interesting and a lot cheaper.

 

Estoril itself wasn’t much to write home about. It had a large casino, but not much else. We were staying on a bed and breakfast basis, and it was cheaper to eat out than in the hotel. My mother rather irritated us by eating in the hotel several times rather than be bothered looking for cheaper places with us. When she did eat with us at a restaurant she was sometimes acutely embarrassing. We found a reasonable place overlooking the main gardens by the casino, and as it was fairly good weather that day we had our meal at a table outside. As the waiter put a cloth on the table my mother exclaimed:

 

‘Oooh!’, like a little girl excited at the sight of a tablecloth, and then tried to speak to the waiter in, of all things, Greek! (She only spoke a few words of the language herself.) We told her it’s no use speaking Greek to a Portuguese waiter, but she just said she kept forgetting.  (Foreigners were associated in her mind with her husband’s friends and relations.) She then asked us how much we should tip the waiter, but as this was early on in the holiday we hadn’t yet gotten used to the local currency, so she tried to ask the waiter how much the various coins were worth. It was quite farcical, an English woman trying to ask in English and Greek what Portuguese coins were worth in English currency to a waiter who only spoke Portuguese. As the young man smiled sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders to indicate he didn’t understand what she was on about, my mother finally had to admit defeat and give up. After that we didn’t try too hard to dissuade her if she decided to eat by herself in the hotel.

 

There was a lovely little town a few kilometers from Estoril, one station down the line in the opposite direction from Lisbon. It was a fishing village called Cascais, full of picturesque streets with whitewashed houses and shops. We spent some nice days there, and saw an open air Festival in one of the little squares in honor of the Portuguese revolution overthrowing the Salazar dictatorship. We also found a very good little cafe in Cascais where we all ate on several occasions.

 

 

There was a big shopping mall in Estoril which included a cinema complex, and I remember George and my mother electing to go and see ‘Amadeus’, the film about Mozart. Since this didn’t appeal to me I went in one of the other cinemas and saw something else. Afterwards we met and had a huge ice cream sundae each in the complex whilst discussing the films we had seen.

 

The last day of our holiday was beautiful weather, so we headed down for the beach thinking at least my mother couldn’t grumble about this day. We were wrong. She embarrassed us more than ever by stripping off down to her petticoat (why on Earth didn’t she wear her bathing costume, like she usually did on beach holidays?) Not content with this exhibitionism, she insisted on putting up her black umbrella to use as a sunshade. This was the first real sun we had seen in our week’s holiday, and she had been moaning about no sun all week, yet there she was sitting in the shade against a wall in her pink petticoat under a black umbrella grumbling: ‘Too bloody hot’ over and over again. We just couldn’t win, and swore never to take her on holiday again.

 

Poor George, no wonder his relationship with my mother was always strained. It was the classic ‘mother-in-law’ situation only worse, since George knew my mother resented George being a man. She had always wanted me to marry a girl and give her some grandchildren. Although my mother said she accepted George, and knew how much he had helped me and was good for me, making me a much more well-adjusted and less bitter person, there was always that unspoken resentment that George was not my wife or the mother of my children, and never could be.

 

We flew back to London on the Friday. It had been an interesting holiday to a new country, but spoiled by the weather and my mother’s rather silly behavior. In later years we laughed at the whole situation, but it caused tension at the time. No wonder George gave my mother the nickname ‘Mum Grouch’. Apart from her moaning, it annoyed him immensely that an intelligent woman should put on this ‘silly little girl’ or ‘senile dementia’ act, but somehow holidays abroad always brought out this eccentric behavior which never happened at home.

 

When we got back our Polish friend, Barbara, was in London, so we arranged to meet her one day. During that Spring we visited Battersea Park several times, where the Buddhist Peace Pagoda was inaugurated on May 14th. I went along to that alone, but while they were still building the Pagoda George and I visited the Buddhist nuns who lived in the park, and gave them a very modest present of some fruit. They were embarrassingly grateful and kept bowing, so we had to keep bowing back, and then to our horror they invited us into a temple-like room with a statue of the Buddha at one end and incense burning, and George and I had to kneel before this ‘golden idol’ with our little bag of fruit as if it were some sacrificial offering. The nuns and monks looking after the Pagoda relied on donations such as ours, but we didn’t expect to have to offer them up to the Buddha first for his blessing. All this Eastern mysticism was hidden away in a little hut behind some bushes in Battersea Park.

 

Our friend Sheila had a party in May and on the 26th, the day before George’s birthday, we paid a visit to Stratford-on-Avon and saw the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Shakespeare’s birthplace, Anne Hathaway’s cottage and the rest of the tourist sights, including some Morris dancers. On George’s birthday itself we went to see ‘Pravda’ (Truth) at the National Theatre. It is a play which sticks in my memory because of the very strong performance by Anthony Hopkins.

 

Two days later there was a party at the Kensington High Street Oxfam shop, in the room at the back. Our friend Lena, who was a volunteer at the shop, was there, and we all sat round and had a little too much to drink, ending up having a good old sing song together.

 

In June we had a weekend in Hastings and we also attended Gay Pride in Jubilee Gardens. The first day of July we met George’s sister Margaret and her friend Anna at Victoria Coach Station, and they stayed with us a week before returning to Glasgow. They went round by themselves most places, probably spending most of their time window-shopping. That month our friends Lena and Frank moved from the cramped furnished room in Earls Court where they had lived for years to a council flat near Westbourne Park tube station.

 

We went to a local meeting about plans for Battersea Power Station, which they were going to turn into a theme park. George and I were all in favor, but the vocal locals and political groups of left, right and center were all against it. In the end the project fell through when the cash ran out, and Battersea Power Station was left an empty, half-ruined shell for years. I always thought it a great pity the theme park never materialized. Battersea had always been associated with the fun fair since the Festival of Britain in 1951, and every other big capital city had an amusement park. George and I thought Battersea Power Station was the ideal replacement for Battersea Fun Fair, which in our view should never have been closed down. It was an exciting project, but the opponents could only see traffic problems.

 

In late August I finished working at Austral Development after about ten years, the longest I had ever stayed in one job. George was to take over from me working with our friend Angel on alternate shifts, as he thought it would enable him to catch up with telex technology, a field he hadn’t worked in for a year or so. The job wasn’t to last, as the firm was on its last legs. We both knew that, and it was the reason I was leaving and taking a part-time job at Amnesty International at slightly less money. It proved to be a very good move for myself, as the money at AI soon went up to way above what I could get per hour anywhere else, but not such a good move for George. He felt later if he’d stayed with Oxfam he would have got a permanent paid job very soon, as he was already a successful voluntary shop leader. But in the end it was his decision to go back to Austral and so end a long period of unemployment.

 

The day after I left Austral we were off to Scotland. During our week’s stay we visited Edinburgh, and went on a one day trip to the Highlands by train, visiting places like Oban (which had a sort of mini-Coliseum) and Fort William. Whilst in Glasgow we paid a visit to the Citizen’s Theatre to see a production.

 

We both started our new jobs on Monday September 2nd, George at Austral Development and myself at Amnesty International. Both of us had worked at these places in the past. Since George had left AI they had moved from Covent Garden to bigger premises at Mount Pleasant. I knew quite a few of the people from when I worked there before on a part-time basis, and also people George had introduced me to at parties and theater visits.

 

On our 15th anniversary we went to the Academy 1 cinema in Oxford Street to see a delightful film starring Deborah Kerr called ‘The Assam Garden’. We had a party the following Saturday to celebrate our anniversary. There was another meeting that month about plans for Battersea Power Station, and we went down to Hastings again for a day. Harvey Fernstein in ‘A Torch Song Trilogy’ was a highlight of the things we saw in September.

 

A note in George’s diary for early November reads: ‘Royal Overseas Club’. This was, incidentally, where my mother met my father before the War. He was a chef and she a waitress. It was also right next door to Austral Development’s old offices before they moved to Knightsbridge, and had become the location for the annual ladies’ Christmas dinner (the men didn’t get one). However, soon after I left they did have a one-off dinner at the Royal Overseas club for all employees and their partners. I believe I was invited to come along more as a past employee than as George’s partner, but it was nice to go together. In December we saw the film ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’, with a strong gay storyline, and we recognized some of the outdoor locations near Vauxhall and Battersea. ‘Letter to Brezhnev’ was another good film we saw that month, though it quickly became very dated, overtaken by the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The year closed quietly without a New Year’s Eve party, but we did have one on the first Saturday in the New Year, 1986.

 

In February we went to a rather strange combined housewarming and 40th birthday party for Ylia and Paula in Hendon Way. Ylia, under his former name of Lee, used to be married to George’s old friend Marlene. He had now re-married, this time into a Jewish family. The house was set back a little from the busy Hendon Way, which is virtually a slip-road to the M1 motorway, but the traffic noise was not all that noticeable. We felt a little out of place with all the rather posh Jewish guests. We seemed to be the only ones who had arrived by bus, so we stayed a little while and then made our escape. There was a sit-down blockade at Molesworth Cruise missile base that month, and this may have been the occasion when the ground was covered in snow and I slipped and fell. Later, on the sit-down demo, I ate my sandwiches and was about to drink a cup of soup from my flask, when I realized the little bits floating in it were shivers of broken glass from inside the flask, which had apparently shattered when I fell, though there was no way of knowing this looking at the outside of the flask. I had a narrow and lucky escape from serious internal injury. George had stayed home for this demo.

 

In early March we were off to Paris for four days, a long weekend. We went with Rose by train and Hovercraft, and stayed in a little Vietnamese-owned hotel near the Eiffel Tower. We had a great time, and Rose really enjoyed it. It may well have been his first trip abroad, and certainly it was his first to Paris. George in particular enjoyed showing his oldest friend around the city he loved so much, and where he had lived for several months in the 1960s. We visited all the usual tourist sights and Oscar Wilde’s grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery, where of course we also visited Edith Piaf’s plot. Our hotel room was rather sleazy, as so often with small Paris hotels, but we loved it. The washing area was screened off by a little partition with an archway, and the walls were covered with pink floral paper. It was quite homely in a way, and we sat in there and ate snacks consisting of French bread, sardines and bottles of duty-free gin.

 

No sooner were we back from Paris than we were off to Amsterdam in March for a weekend. I can’t recall the details as we went so many times. We spent Easter fairly quietly at home, and saw two gay productions - ‘The Normal Heart’, one of the first plays about AIDS, at the Royal Court Theatre, and the fabulous musical ‘La Cage Aux Folles’ based on the French comedy film, at the London Palladium. Sadly the AIDS crisis soon killed off this brilliant, sparkling production packed full of excellent songs. Unfortunately, the public mood stirred up by the tabloids over AIDS meant it was not the right time for a jolly musical about gays to succeed in the West End, but the night we saw it the house was packed, and most of the audience were heterosexuals who thoroughly enjoyed it.

 

A few days later we had dinner with our friend Anne, the daughter of someone George worked with at Oxfam. They were both very good friends, and they witnessed our Wills for us in which we left everything to each other, or to Oxfam if we both died together (I’d left a small legacy for my mother too.) I remember they signed these home-typed Wills in the cafeteria at the Royal Festival Hall.

 

Significantly we watched an AIDS movie on TV called ‘An Early Frost’ and George remarked in his diary that it was ‘very good’. In later years he would turn the TV off or to another channel when AIDS was mentioned, and in retrospect I can see he was OK with AIDS plays, films and TV programs until he started to develop possible symptoms (recurrent mouth ulcers) of HIV himself around mid-1988. On a lighter note, we saw the very funny film ‘Clockwise’ starring John Cleese, and Joan Hickson as a dotty old lady. We also saw a play at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn which was based on the book about a CND supporter who died under mysterious circumstances possibly involving the intelligence services, ‘Who Killed Hilda Murrell?’ That month we also helped out at a local CND booksale, which didn’t make nearly as much money as their usual jumble sale, although for middle-class fundraisers books are considered nicer to handle than old clothes and junk. For the Spring Bank Holiday we spent a long weekend in Hastings. The Tuesday was George’s birthday, so we celebrated on the following Saturday with a party.

 

I believe it was in June that I had my first visit to see ‘Les Miserables’, which I saw four times and George six times in all. George took me to see it for the first time with Pat, a co-worker from Oxfam. I didn’t enjoy it so much the first time, partly because my seat had a restricted view, but once I got to know the music it became a favorite of mine too. It is a very operatic type of musical, but the score is really tuneful and moving, as is the story, of course, from Victor Hugo’s book. The sets are also very dramatic, and almost like oil paintings brought to life due to the clever lighting.

 

At the end of the month we were off on our first visit to Yugoslavia.  We visited places which after George’s death became the location of atrocities and bloodbaths not seen in Europe since the Second World War. It broke my heart to read about it, because my memories of the holiday with George was of a beautiful country with happy people all living peacefully together. It was the nearest thing to paradise we could imagine on Earth, a clever amalgamation of the best of Communism and Capitalism, and very prosperous compared with East Germany, for instance, the only other Communist country George and I visited together. It is a tragedy that nationalism destroyed such a wonderful Socialist federation of Republics. Tito must have wept in his grave at the futility of it all and the end of a dream he had worked so hard to create. Had the system not been corrupted by opportunists, of course, the ‘Communist’ politicians would not have become ‘ultra-nationalists’ overnight. Like other Communist regimes, Yugoslavia was a one-party dictatorship, but the economic system of market socialism is a model I am sure will supersede capitalism in the 21st century, since it avoids the mistakes and inefficiencies of state monopoly Socialism.

 

We flew to Dubrovnik on Saturday June 28th, and next day set off on a coach tour of the country which was to last a week. Traveling up coast and then inland, we left Croatia and entered Bosnia-Hercegovina where we visited Mostar with its ancient arched bridge (since destroyed then rebuilt). We crossed this and went inside what they called a ‘Turkish’ house, which was a Muslim dwelling open to visitors.

 

Next stop was Sarajevo where we stayed in a skyscraper hotel in a wide boulevard. A tremendous dramatic thunderstorm brew up the night we arrived, perhaps symbolic of the turmoil to come to that ill-fated city.

 

It was here in the Sarajevo hotel that our Slovenian courier, Paul, made his move. He invited us to join him at his table for dinner. Afterwards we had drinks in the bar, and he invited us up to his room for more drinks and... well, it was pretty obvious by then what he was after. This is where George’s problems came to the fore. Whether or not he fancied Paul, he just could not respond to his advances at all without amphetamines, and he had none with him on this trip. The result was he got into a blind panic, and just could not cope with the situation. He had one drink in Paul’s room and then made his excuses and left.

 

Paul was reasonably good-looking but certainly not the dream courier one might have fantasies about scoring with. However, I felt we had led him along a bit, or allowed him to lead us on, and accepted his drinks, etc., and we had many days to go with him on the trip. I did not feel I too could make my excuses and leave. George had said to me he didn’t mind if I stayed, so Paul and myself had a little session and then I left to join George for the night. I had to try and explain George’s behavior to Paul, and the best I could think of was that he wasn’t very well and wasn’t in the mood. Both were the wrong thing to say, because next day as we boarded the coach Paul asked George how he felt today and if he was in ‘a better mood’. He was definitely interested in scoring with George, and I got the feeling it was him rather than me Paul was really after. For George in his later years, however, it was strictly a case of ‘no sweeties, no sex’ and it was as frustrating for him as for those who had desires on him. So those few minutes with Paul were the only sex I had myself during the holiday.

 

Next day we visited the center of the city, including a museum near the spot where the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand took place which sparked the First World War. The actual street corner where this happened was pointed out to us. We then went on to Banja Luka for our overnight stay, stopping en route in Jajce where there was an impressive waterfall. We had a quick look round the shops in Banja Luka that night, but we were off quite early headed for the Croatian capital.

 

Zagreb was a very European city after Muslim Mostar and Sarajevo, with an impressive twin-spired Gothic cathedral, and a delightful church with a Central/East European type spire (like a squashed onion) and colorful mosaics on its sloping roof, visible from the street, depicting various coats-of-arms. There was also a big square ablaze with neon signs at night, and full of cafe tables and people by day. We stayed at a very up market hotel in Zagreb, the Inter-Continental (part of the Western chain).

 

Next stop on our itinerary was Ljubljana in Slovenia, and the city where our courier, Paul, had been to University. We only had an hour or two there, but what we saw of it was very attractive. There was a beautiful bridge over the river, a fortress on a hill overlooking the city and plenty of big shops.

 

For our overnight stop we stayed in a rural setting in Postojna, where there are some very deep caves. The hotel was set by a weir on a river, and was also right next to the cave system, which of course we visited. The only thing I can remember is how very cold they were, and how warm it felt when we came back into the sunshine.

 

Bypassing the center of Rijeka, then the main northern port of Yugoslavia, we headed inland again for the Plitvice area for our overnight stay. This was really the highlight of the coach tour for me, a beautiful rural park full of waterfalls, lakes and woods. I swam in the lake, and we went on a kind of nature land trail part of which crossed the lakes on floating bridges consisting of a footpath made of planks literally floating on the water. It was the most beautiful place in our entire trip, which had included some breathtaking scenery. Imagine how sad I was years after George died to read of the bloodshed that had taken place right there in Plitvice amidst all that natural beauty. For me, however, it remains a tranquil place of beauty and peace in a wonderful, united, Socialist country called Yugoslavia where I spent three happy holidays.

 

Our next stop was Zadar, an ancient town on the coast with some old Roman-type remains by an unusual circular building next to a five-story spire. We had a meal in a restaurant overlooking the marina.

 

Further down the coast we stopped in Trogir, a very picturesque town with palm trees lining the promenade, and a fortress, clock tower and some other impressive buildings.

 

Our next overnight stop was in Split, in a modern hotel overlooking the harbor. We fell in love with Split, and may well have paid another visit there sometime had George’s death and the civil war not intervened. One disadvantage over Dubrovnik, however, was the apparent lack of good, accessible beaches in the town itself.

 

It was a very interesting city indeed. The old part of the town was a hodgepodge of architecture from different eras. Relatively modern buildings had been erected literally on top of much older walls, beneath which were dungeons or catacombs. Inside the ancient walled city were some old ruins and columns, and mushrooming between these were the colorful umbrellas of a street market. There were little narrow winding streets, which opened up into open piazzas and irregularly shaped ‘squares’. One in particular which had cafe tables set out we stopped at several times for drinks.

 

It was in Split we discovered Mestrovic, a local sculptor whose statue of a religious figure dominated some gardens just outside the city wall.  There was an art gallery dedicated to his work, and we enjoyed it immensely. He had a unique style, specializing in impressive, heavy, solid Slavic figures, some in almost surrealist postures. We liked his work so much we bought a white figurine depicting one of Mestrovic’s works on display in the gallery, a peasant woman in a headscarf, kneeling on one knee with her hands clasped over her ears. The sculpture is entitled ‘Despair’. It was prophetic of the times to come in that beautiful, troubled land. All this symbolism was lost on George’s sister when she visited from Glasgow one time, saw the peasant woman ornament and commented: ‘That woman looks as if she’s got a sore heed.’

 

We arrived back in Dubrovnik at the end of our coach tour and said farewell to Paul, our courier, before moving into our hotel for our week’s stay in the city.

 

It seemed Dubrovnik had everything. An ancient walled city which was perhaps the best preserved anywhere in the world. Also many excellent beaches, and a hill with a cable car overlooking the Old Town. Also an island just offshore, easy to reach by boat. We explored all these during our stay.

 

The Dubrovnik Festival was on whilst we were there, and we attended the opening ceremony which was held after dark and consisted of a procession in medieval costume. There was also a very impressive firework display which we watched from the walls of the Old City overlooking the sea.

 

The Old Town within the walls contained one long, wide pedestrian street (motor vehicles are banned from the Old Town) lined with shops and with a clock tower at one end. Just off this street in a maze of narrow alleys was a self-service restaurant we visited nearly every day. We called it Madame Tito’s after a nice woman who worked there under the obligatory portrait of Marshal Tito.

 

We loved exploring the alleyways, and because the town was built on different levels, many of these narrow streets were very steep, with flights of steps. The buildings were very close together, and there was plenty of foliage in the narrow streets. There were also tranquil courtyards with palm trees and other plants.

 

We walked right around the city walls, which give beautiful views of the tiled-roofed Old Town, the sea and islands and the mountain behind (from which the Serbs later shelled the ancient city, but thankfully did little damage apparently).

 

The main entrance to the Old Town was by way of an arch and drawbridge, and this led to the main square from which the local buses left. The other side of the Old Town we discovered a little beach, which was very convenient when you wanted to relax after walking round the hot cobbled streets.

 

Whilst in Dubrovnik I bought a snorkel and mask and discovered for the first time a whole new dimension beneath the sea in the crystal clear waters of the Adriatic, which are excellent for this activity, the fauna, rock formations and fish being so interesting and abundant.

 

We also visited a beach further out of town near the main tourist hotels. This gave the impression of being on a lake, because the sea inlet here was surrounded by mountains. It was like a tropical version of the Scottish lochs or English lake district. This was the Babin Kuk area of Dubrovnik. We also visited the nearby island, mainly covered with trees, and I had a swim in the sea there too, and in a little pond on the island.

 

We went up in the cable car and from the mountain top had a breathtaking view of the Old Town, harbor and the island. Also of the modern town beyond the city walls.

 

Whilst staying in Dubrovnik we went by bus to the nearby town of Cavtat, where there is a mausoleum set on a hill jutting out to sea. You can walk all round the peninsular in about half an hour, which has a rocky beach good for swimming and snorkeling. Cavtat was also an attractive little town, with narrow streets and pleasant pavement cafes, and it was also surrounded by mountains, making it very picturesque.

 

On Saturday July 12th we returned to London, having packed an awful lot into those two weeks. We had seen most of Yugoslavia, but strangely Serbia and the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade had been omitted from this, and most other, tours of the country. We certainly enjoyed what we saw very much, and decided to go back again the following year.

 

A few days after we got back we went to see ‘La Cage Aux Folles 3', but as you might expect the second sequel was not as good as the first, which itself was not nearly as good as the original film.

 

The following weekend George’s sister, Betty, arrived in London and we met her overnight coach at 7.30 a.m. Sunday morning at Kings Cross. If relatives must visit, at least they could have the decency not to arrive at such an unholy hour on a Sunday morning.

 

George doesn’t record in his diary now long Betty stayed or who she brought with her (usually a niece or nephew, or both), but exactly two weeks later her sister Margaret and her boyfriend, Andy, arrived by the more expensive coach service direct to Victoria Coach Station. Margaret’s husband had died suddenly of a heart attack some years before, and she had met Andy at a singles’ club. The family didn’t like him much, probably because he was very quiet and was something of a mystery. There was a family joke that he kept so quiet about his past he might well be a cat burglar. We felt, during their one week stay with us, that we were being used as a cheap hotel, so little did we see of them. When they were in, they didn’t communicate much. In later years, after George died and Margaret secretly married Andy, he seemed to open out and became quite friendly. I could never understand why their marriage was such a secret and kept from some relatives: most couples pretend they’re married rather than just living together, but with Margaret and Andy it was the other way around.

 

August Bank Holiday weekend we went to stay with Rose in Hastings, as we so often did. One year I stayed for a whole week around the Bank Holiday weekend, George just staying for the 3 days. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay, and got plenty of exercise walking across the cliffs to the nudist swimming beach near Fairlight Glen on several occasions, because it was a new experience and a lovely walk there and back, though very strenuous.

 

At the very end of August we went to the London Palladium to see again the musical version of ‘La Cage Aux Folles’. We probably would have gone to see it more than two times had it not been taken off soon after.

 

We celebrated our 16th anniversary on September 10th by going to see the sequel film ‘Aliens’, and towards the end of the month had a memorable day trip to Cardiff. We walked all round the city center, visiting the shops and arcades, the park with its castle and the impressive civic buildings. Best of all we found a market place and brought home with us the most delicious sausages we had ever tasted.

 

Two days later we went to see ‘The House of Bernardo Alba’ at The Lyric, Hammersmith. It was a somber piece, with a very atmospheric set, but light relief was offered in the guise of the marvelous Patricia Hayes who played a grandmother figure in her typical comic manner.

 

The next day we visited Alton Towers theme park, but were not very impressed. It all seemed very tame after Disneyland in California. In fact, we both preferred Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Alton Towers seemed a vast area of empty grassland, with just a few rides scattered here and there. We liked the White Water ride and the Log Flume, but there was nothing really spectacular to compare with Disneyland.

 

Just over a week later on a Saturday in early October we paid one of several visits to York by train, a city we really liked. It was full of history with a castle, well preserved walls, and some fine Tudor buildings, as well as a cathedral. We wandered round ‘The Shambles’, as one of the Tudor-style shopping streets is known, and followed the walls round all the main tourist sights.

 

Nothing of note happened for the rest of the year. I believe it was in January we saw a preview of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ with Michael Crawford in the title role. One Saturday in early February 1987 we went to see a matinee production of ‘Road’ at the Royal Court Theater. The auditorium seats had been removed, and the ‘Road’ set had been extended from the stage into the auditorium. The audience wandered around the set watching the action/acting taking place around them. It was an innovative piece of theater and we both enjoyed it very much. It was so realistic that Ian Drury greeted us in a Cockney accent as we entered, and unthinkingly I replied in similar vein. I am a born Londoner myself, but in any case tend to unconsciously modify my accent according to whom I am speaking. I come out with Glaswegian expressions when in Glasgow, Americanisms when talking to Americans, and start to adopt aspects of the various dialects of England when with people of those areas for more than a few hours. On this occasion when asked by Ian ‘Where d’ya come from mate?’ I instantly replied ‘Ba-ersea’ with a very pronounced glotteral stop in place of the ‘tt’, and immediately felt very foolish.

 

After the play we went to visit an Indian colleague of George’s who worked at the Oxfam shop in King’s Road, Chelsea. She lived just round the corner from there, and I was enthralled with her exotic little flat smelling of incense and decorated with Eastern drapes and artifacts (though a peek into the kitchen was a mistake, it was a hovel). I was also very impressed when she told us stories and showed us Indian newspaper cuttings of when she was a very famous actress there. She also showed us some home movies taken during a holiday to India, and she swore there was a scene in the finished film which she had never taken, but which had appeared supernaturally.

 

On the last day of February we went to a friend’s party, which was held in a scouts’ hall by Barnes common. Sharon worked with us at Austral Development, but was off on a world tour taking in Australia the next day. We too were off to less far flung places.

 

Next day we departed Gatwick early in the morning bound for Gibraltar and a tour of Southern Spain, with possibly our first visit to North Africa thrown in.

 

We caught an early morning flight from Gatwick and arrived at the very unusual Gibraltar airport, on a narrow isthmus between Spain and The Rock, about midday. The sun was shining and we were in for a very pleasant surprise as we were driven, not into Gibraltar town itself, but to the other side of The Rock and a little village called Catalan Bay. This consisted of a few houses, shops, bars, a little church and a quite big hotel, plus a sandy beach. Our hotel was right next to the beach, and I well remember going in the sea for a swim the day we arrived, March 1st. The sea was cold, but I enjoyed it all the more because we just never expected to be anywhere near a beach on this touring holiday, and certainly did not expect this hot sunshine so early in the year.

 

Next day we were hoping to take a one day trip to Tangier in Morocco, just across the Straits, as advertised in the holiday brochure. However, at the welcoming party the night before they announced that for some reason the trip was off, so George and I never got to step foot on the African continent together. Instead we spent more time on the beach. There weren’t that many tourists, but quite a few young lads were loafing around in jeans and Union Jack t-shirts, obviously from the British military bases on the other side of The Rock.

 

The bars were full of them too, and no wonder. Drinks, especially spirits, were ridiculously cheap. George and I knocked back the gin and tonics like there was no tomorrow.

 

We did a tour of The Rock that day too, through Gibraltar town and right up to Europa Point to view the Pillars of Hercules. These are two mountains, The Rock of Gibraltar itself and another mountain in Morocco, which stand each side of the Straits of Gibraltar, one ‘pillar’ in Europe and the other in Africa. Through the heat haze we could just make out the mountain on the other side, the only time George and I glimpsed the African continent together.

 

There was a cable car from Gibraltar town up to the top of The Rock, but we went by road in the coach, and halfway up The Rock alongside the road we encountered the famous Barbary Apes roaming around free as birds. Rumor has it that when they disappear or die off, the British will leave Gibraltar. The coach then drove on to some excavations in The Rock, which we explored on foot. These caves led right through to the other side, and there were observation points looking out across the airport towards Spain. Of course all these were used as fortifications in the Second World War.

 

We also spent some time walking around Gibraltar town, getting a little bus in from Catalan Bay. It was an eerie experience seeing shops you would find in any British high street, red pillar boxes and British police uniforms in a Mediterranean climate. It felt like being on the Isle of Wight or somewhere very close to home, but it also didn’t seem right to us and smacked of colonialism. As with the Malvinas/Falklands, we felt the wishes of local British settlers and their descendants should not be the sole arbiter when deciding the status of former colonies. The views of ethnic Argentinians should help decide the future status of the Malvinas, and the views of ethnic Spanish the future of Gibraltar. A compromise solution would be the obvious answer in each case, perhaps some sort of autonomy linked to the neighboring Argentinian and Spanish states rather than the British one so far away.

 

Next day we set off in the coach across the airport runway, which transversed the main road from Gibraltar into Spain. Luckily there seem to be few collisions between planes and road traffic as people tend to obey the lights and gates of this unique level crossing. We crossed the border into Spain and headed for Seville by way of Jerez, famous for its namesake, sherry.

 

We of course stopped in Jerez and visited the Sandemann’s sherry distillery, where we saw the process and had a good sample of the product. We sat at long tables where bottles and glasses were placed at our disposal. George remarked afterwards how all those people with phony posh accents gradually lost them as they drank more sherry, till they were laughing and joking in working class dialects like the rest of us, betraying their true origins. He really enjoyed this observation as much as the sherry itself.

 

We then pressed on to Seville (famous for its oranges and the opera ‘Carmen’) for our two night stay. As soon as we reached Seville we saw orange trees full of fruit lining the streets. We were told they were bitter and only fit for marmalade, but whether this was just a tale told to tourists to stop the trees being stripped bare I can’t say.

 

Our time in Seville was marred by George’s face swelling up alarmingly around the eyes. We went to a local pharmacist in Seville, and the assistant diagnosed acute sunburn. Lying out in that hot Gibraltar sunshine after coming straight from an English winter had caused George’s face to react in this way. The pharmacist prescribed some cream which George applied, and by the time we left Seville his face was going back to normal.

 

Despite George’s trouble and difficulty seeing clearly because of it, we explored the city, including the mosaics of Spanish Square, the buildings of Americas Square, the cathedral and the old streets around it. We also visited an orange grove in the Alcazar area.

 

On the Thursday we set off in the coach for Cordoba, stopping on the way in Ejica which also had a very big church or cathedral by the main square, which was full of locals standing or sitting around chatting and enjoying the sun.

 

We arrived in Cordoba where we were spending one night. It had a river, some narrow winding streets and a huge mosque, part of which had been converted into a Catholic cathedral. We were amazed at the sheer size of the mosque, the columns of which gave us the impression of being in a petrified forest. Some were very ornate and made of colored marble. Suddenly and rather disconcertingly you came into a very ornate Christian cathedral, completely at odds with the Moorish architecture of the rest of the building. From the outside the Christian bell tower dominated the mosque. It had been built around the mosque’s original minaret. Of course it was both religious and architectural sacrilege, with the result that the Cordoba mosque was neither one thing nor the other, but the Christian alterations had been done a long time ago so were themselves of some historical interest.

 

On the Friday we set off for Granada, dominated by the famous Alhambra high on a hill overlooking the city. We visited this palace, but were a little disappointed with it as it seemed rather plain.

 

We enjoyed exploring the city, and found a quiet area with a little stream running through it, as well as the main squares and big shops.

 

Our hotel room had a balcony, and we sat out there in the sunshine with snow-capped mountains in the background. We were taken up these mountains in the coach and visited the ski resort at the top. We watched the skiers piling into the cable cars and skiing down again. It was quite a new experience for us, but we didn’t feel tempted to have a go ourselves.

 

We drove back to Gibraltar via the coast and dreadful places like Torremolinos and Fuengirola. It think it was at the latter resort we stopped for breakfast at a huge hotel where you had to line up in separate queues for tea and coffee, toast, and boiled eggs. It was like the feeding of the 5,000, and this mass catering and the gray skyscraper slabs that dominated the resorts confirmed that we were right to avoid them like the plague, choosing the architecturally purer resorts of the Costa Brava instead. Llorret de Mar certainly had its share of tourist hotels and nightlife, but still looked and felt like a Catalan town, with only one building which could be described as a small ‘skyscraper’. Torremolinos and Fuengirola were just huge tourist resorts with nothing but skyscraper hotels, tourist shops and bars and apparently not a scrap of Spanish culture to be seen.

 

We arrived at the airport in Gibraltar with plenty of time to spare for our flight home, and whereas in most airports this is a boring time locked up in the departure area, with only the duty free shop to console you, here in Gibraltar we were free to stroll out of the terminal building, walk across the runway on the main road and go into Gibraltar town. We didn’t venture too far, but stopped at a Wimpy bar and had a snack and a drink before wandering leisurely back to the airport. Our fellow passengers were amazed when we told them we had strolled into town for a snack, whilst they had been huddled round the airport bar afraid to wander even out of the airport building.

 

We flew back home arriving in the early afternoon of Sunday, and as we arrived back in the depths of winter I could hardly believe I had been swimming in the Mediterranean just a week before, or that George had gotten badly sunburnt lying on the beach.

 

The next few weeks were fairly quiet. We really enjoyed seeing Julie Walters in the very funny film ‘Personal Services’ loosely based on Cynthia Payne’s brothel in suburbia, and on Good Friday we went to Hastings to see our friends Rose and Neil.

 

In late April I was off to Cyprus for a week with my mother.  George didn’t want to come, as he felt the island had little attraction for him. I strongly suspect a letter my father had once written about it not being a good idea my coming to Cyprus with my boyfriend had a lot to do with it.

 

My father had met George and got on well with him, even telling me he was very good for me. He knew the score back then, but later word had apparently gotten round his village in Cyprus that I was gay, which was beyond the pale in that society. I angrily told my dad I’d bring who I liked, and if the villagers knew I was gay he must have told them himself, which he admitted was true. That argument had been years before, but understandably George felt uncomfortable about coming with us. Anyway, after previous experiences on holiday with my mother, especially the recent Portuguese trip, George was quite happy to let me go on my second visit to Cyprus with her whilst he stayed at home.

 

My mother had never visited Cyprus although my dad was Greek-Cypriot. Plans to visit had fallen by the wayside for various reasons, not least their separation in 1951 and all that led up to it. The separation had, in fact, been precipitated by a planned visit to Cyprus. A friend told my mum that the holiday in Cyprus planned for the family in that year would be a one-way trip for my brother and myself, as my dad intended to bring us up in Cyprus so hadn’t bought us return tickets.

 

It was a pity my mother hadn’t come with me to Cyprus ten years earlier as my dad’s mother longed to meet her, and sadly died shortly after my first visit. They had corresponded by letter years before, my mother reporting to my grandmother the progress of my various operations as a child. Now my grandmother was gone so was one of the main motivations for my mother visiting Cyprus, so I think she embarked on the trip with mixed feelings.

 

She had only sporadic contact with my dad in the preceding 36 years, and while part of her wanted to see Cyprus and places she had heard about, part of her was very apprehensive.

 

We arrived to atrocious weather, which kept up half the week we were there. We stayed at a little hotel in Kato Paphos, a few blocks from the house where my dad lived with his former business partner and common law wife, Helen. We had a meal there once, and Helen tried to make my mother feel welcome, though she speaks very little English and my mother very little Greek. Needless to say the atmosphere was strained.

 

My dad lent me his car for the week, and I soon got the hang of driving again. We visited the Tombs of the Kings and mosaics in the Paphos area, and then I took my mum into the Troodos mountains. I had decided to take this more scenic route to Nicosia, the capital, but it proved disastrous because of the torrential rain.

 

We could see very little scenery because of the weather, and my mother was terrified by the hairpin bends on mountainous roads too narrow in most places for two cars to pass, with a sheer drop on one side. We reached the tomb of Archbishop Makarios high on a mountain and I got out of the car and ran several hundred yards in pouring rain to visit it, but my mum stayed in the car. She said later she thought she might be stranded there forever, and had visions of me stumbling and falling off the mountain in the downpour.

 

I came back drenched, and we carried on. The roads got steadily worse and became rough mud tracks. We came across a Greek-Cypriot family whose car had broken down and was stuck in the mud. They spoke not a word of English, but they made quite clear they wanted a lift to Nicosia. As few cars were likely to be taking this route in such terrible conditions we could hardly refuse, and anyway we thought they could help with directions.

 

The man stayed with his car whilst an elderly woman in black and presumably her daughter sat in the back and helped direct us. We entered Nicosia by a totally unfamiliar route to me, and suddenly the two women demanded to be let out. We dropped them off to find we were heading straight for the Turkish sector, so no wonder they were in such a hurry to get out. We turned right to avoid the checkpoint and eventually I managed to find my dad’s block of flats. He had given me the keys to stay a couple of nights.

 

We got in to find there was no food in the place and we couldn’t get the stove working, so we ate in a nearby cafe. I managed to get the TV working, and left my mum watching that whilst I took a quick drive downtown. I just wanted to check out the sunken gardens by the walls of the Old Town to see if the gay scene I had discovered ten years before was still thriving. It wasn’t - there had obviously been a big clean-up and not a soul was about even though the weather in Nicosia was dry (we’d left the rain back in the mountains).

 

I drove back to the flat, we watched a bit of TV and then went to bed. My mother refused to sleep in the big bedroom because she said it stunk of Helen’s scent, so I slept there and she had the smaller room.

 

Next day I drove my mother into Nicosia and we walked around the shops and the Old Town. Her shoes were hurting her, so we went into a shoe shop in the Old Town and bought some comfortable sandals. I remember feeling very embarrassed because as she took her shoes off her feet were black, but the shop assistant didn’t bat an eyelid. I don’t know if it was dirt from the streets or dye from her shoes, probably the latter in that heat.

 

We walked on up to the Green Line and looked into the UN Zone and the Turkish quarter beyond. Later we tried, as long planned, to visit that part of Nicosia which is the capital of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but I made a fatal mistake and we were refused entry.

 

Ten years before I had visited the Turkish part of Nicosia in what was then known as the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus. I had followed my dad’s instructions and stated that my father was English. This time I forgot, and as we entered the customs office on the Turkish side they asked one of us to fill in a form. If my mother had filled it in there would have been no problem, as only one in each party had do so, and only the person actually filling in the form had to state the nationality of his or her parents. My mother’s parents were both English.

 

However my mother left the form for me to fill in, and foolishly I wrote that my dad was Greek-Cypriot. So, although we both had British passports, they wouldn’t let us in. Before leaving for Cyprus I had even been to the London travel office of the TRNC, which doubles as an unofficial ‘embassy’, and spoken to a high ranking official about my forthcoming visit and tried to get a visa in advance. I had told him my father was Greek-Cypriot, but that I was very sympathetic to the Turkish-Cypriots and thought the Greeks were to blame for the current situation. Even then it didn’t occur to me I was saying all the wrong things. I should have just walked up to the border and gone in as a British tourist like anyone else. The London official simply told me to apply for a visa at the border post. That’s what comes of being a total outsider to the Turkish/Greek Cypriot mentalities of mutual distrust and hatred - being British I just accepted two equal Cypriot republics even if one was only recognized by Turkey, and didn’t realize the Turkish side had every reason to be suspicious of Greek-Cypriots trying to enter their zone. Since then the regulations were altered to allow non-Cypriot citizens with Greek-Cypriot parentage to visit the TRNC at their discretion.  On a later visit I was not even asked any awkward questions before being granted a visa. Later still in 2003 the borders were opened to most Cypriots living in Cyprus to visit the other republic, nearly 29 years after the closed border came into existence (although even before this Turkish Cypriots could unofficially slip into the Greek-Cypriot republic via a Turkish-Cypriot border post adjacent to the British Dhekelia sovereign base. The Greek-Cypriots had no jurisdiction at this border post. No Greek-Cypriot citizens could enter the Turkish-Cypriot republic before 2003 except on a few special occasions.)

 

We took the fast motorway back to Paphos by way of Limassol, and on the way stopped off at Kolossi Castle and the ancient theater at Curium. We also stopped at a beach by Aphrodites’ birthplace and I went in for a dip, and nearly got my neck broken by the force of the huge waves which threw me right over.

 

Later in the week I took my mum up into the mountains again so she could appreciate their beauty in fine weather. We also visited Aphrodites’ Baths on the northwestern tip of Cyprus, stopping at Coral Bay on the way. This had been a deserted golden sandy beach ten years before, but was now packed with tourists. An airport had been built in the Paphos area in the intervening years which had totally altered the nature of Paphos itself and the surrounding area. Ten years before Kato (Lower) Paphos had been a little fishing town with a quiet harbor, but it was now full of discos, restaurants, hotels and was almost indistinguishable from Mediterranean resorts in Spain and elsewhere.

 

After visiting Aphrodites’ Baths, which is a little grotto with water running down into a pool, we visited my Uncle Filaktis and his second wife, Marie, in Polis. This was a very happy visit as my mum got on well with my dad’s brother. Sadly he died of a heart attack shortly after our visit, and his wife was heartbroken. She was in ill health herself with cancer and died a few years later.

 

We also visited other relations whilst in Cyprus, such as my dad’s other brother, Costas. His sister, Athena, was visiting her daughters in England at the time, but we visited her house and saw her husband Michael. My mum knew both of them as they had lived in London for many years. The house where they lived was the one where my father had been born, so this must have been as interesting for my mum as it was for me, even though the house had been altered quite a bit since then, although it was still very basic compared to many other houses in the village. It had no electricity, plumbing or sanitation before the War, and I think my mum was quite surprised after all the horror stories she had heard from Filaktis’ first wife about having to dig a hole in the field to go to the toilet, and sleeping on straw with the animals to find the house now had all these modern facilities (though only an outside flush toilet, no bathroom, and hot water only from a tap in the basement area.)

 

Whilst in the village we visited my grandparents’ grave, and were both shocked at the neglected state of it, and the fact that my poor grandmother had been interred with my grandfather (who had been the local priest) but nobody had bothered to alter the inscription to indicate she was also buried there. Such is the position of women in rural Greek-Cypriot society, even in death they are completely overshadowed by their husbands, though an inscription with her name was later added.

 

I must relate one other story about our visit to Cyprus. My father decided to take us for a day out, and he drove us to some monastery in the mountains. Now my dad has never been a religious man. He has had strong connexions with the Greek Orthodox Church both in London and Cyprus, giving lots of money to it and serving on committees, but at the same time he was an avowed atheist. The Church is a political as well as a religious animal in Cyprus, and my father used it to win influence, giving it money publicly whilst decrying its riches in private.

 

This hypocrisy was demonstrated when we all walked into a little church by the monastery, and my dad made a big show of crossing himself several times, and then kissing every icon in the church.

 

This was never part of the culture of myself or my mother. True I was christened in a Greek Orthodox cathedral in London, but we had always attended either the Anglican or Methodist churches as children.

 

My father was in a furious temper as we drove back. He picked on me, ignoring my mother’s similar misdemeanor, and accused me of entering the church like a tourist, with my hands clasped behind my back. He also said my brother and his wife were just as bad, which I suppose was some consolation.

 

We flew back home the first week in May. The weather had been much better the second half of the week, and I think on the whole my mother enjoyed the holiday and was glad we went. I had phoned George once or twice from the hotel in Paphos, but was so glad to see him again after our week apart.       

 

We celebrated George’s birthday at the end of the month by going to the National Theatre to see ‘Six Characters In Search of an Author’. I believe this was the play in which various characters of the 20th century such as Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and Albert Einstein all find themselves in the same New York hotel room for the night. In June we went to Hyde Park for the Gay Pride carnival, and a memorable film we saw was ‘Prick Up Your Ears’ about Joe Orton which we saw at a cinema in Islington very near where Joe and his lover lived.

 

In early July we set off on our second visit to Yugoslavia, this time to stay in Dubrovnik for two weeks.

 

We stayed at the Hotel Tirena in the modern Babin Kuk complex we had visited the year before. Then it had seemed that there was plenty of entertainment going on each night, but staying there for two weeks gave a quite different impression. We got to know the exact time by the numbers the band outside our window were singing, since it was exactly the same repertoire each night. Of course we could wander along the pedestrian walkways to the other end of the complex and hear another band going through their regular routine for a change, but that was about as varied as it got. Nevertheless we really enjoyed this holiday.

 

We spent a lot of time on the picturesque Babin Kuk beach with its mountainous scenery, and also visited other beaches in Dubrovnik. We spent quite a bit of time in the Lapad area, which is the modern port and shopping district. A woman there used to feed wild cats fish every day. We went on a boat trip in a little craft from this port, and also had drinks on the roof of a department store overlooking the port, with mountains beyond.

 

We had timed our visit to coincide with the Dubrovnik Festival again. We had done most of our traveling the previous year, but we went on a one day trip south through Montenegro to the Albanian border.

 

It was not a very memorable tour, not least because a recent earthquake had damaged Kotor and some of the other places en route. We stopped at a village called Ston on the side of a mountain, and walked round its walls. Since part of the walls are in open countryside with a bit of imagination you could believe you were on a very small section of the Great Wall of China. Many of the buildings in Kotor were shored up for support after the earthquake and some streets were closed, but after a look around we got back on the coach and climbed up into the mountains until Kotor and its inlet were laid out like a map far below us.

 

We headed for Titograd for our lunch stop, but saw nothing of this city evidently important enough to be named after the late leader of Yugoslavia. We were taken to a hotel restaurant in the suburbs for a mediocre meal then straight out again without seeing the center of the city at all.

 

We then headed further south for Lake Shkoder, the southern part of which is in Albania as is the town of Shkoder. The lake and the area around seemed very eerie, as did the locals. Perhaps it was psychological, knowing we were heading straight for the most mysterious country in Europe - a Stalinist backwater. For me it was a bit like those Hammer horror films as travelers entered Transylvania - very weird and a little scary. It was almost as if we had left planet Earth and entered a parallel universe.

 

The lake was so still and silent, and seemed to be covered in green leaves and slime. We climbed high into the mountains on the western side of the lake, still heading south, through wooded areas on narrow mountain roads on which the only other traffic was ancient looking horse-drawn carts driven and ridden by people in very strange looking garb, presumably some kind of national or peasant costume. We assumed these were ethnic Albanians, and the sense of foreboding and expectation was intense. In the event it all ended in a big anti-climax.

 

Suddenly the road turned sharply to the right to go round the mountain, and the coach stopped. We were invited to get out and look into Albania from the edge of this mountain road.

 

How far we were from the actual border I have no idea, but certainly too far away to see any border fences or observation posts. It all looked so tame and ordinary after the mysterious, sinister mountainous wooded lakeside area we had just come through. Below us was just gently undulating peaceful countryside - we might just as well have been on a hill overlooking Surrey or Kent. Even the eerie Lake Shkoder was now out of sight way over to our left. Disappointingly, there were no bright red hoardings praising the Albanian Party of Labor, and no 200 foot statues of Stalin and Enver Hoxha to be seen.

 

When we asked our guide where the border was she unhelpfully said: ‘Where the minarets of the mosques stop’. Enver Hoxha had, of course, ordered them all destroyed in this officially atheistic state. We were far too high up to see any detail, but there were minarets dotted around for some distance, so we were obviously a mile or so from the border at least. I could see a winding river in the distance, which I later ascertained from looking at the map was in Albania, but it was all a huge disappointment and certainly not worth a full day’s coach trip. At least they could have taken us right up to the border after coming all this way.

 

We drove back north via the coastal road, stopping at Rezevici Monastery on the way. The monks here made some kind of alcoholic spirit which they sold to tourists, and we were all given a sample. George peeked into the kitchen and saw the supposedly celibate monks apparently had nubile female helpers, and he remarked that with the abundance of very high proof alcohol and pretty young females the brothers seemed to lead a pretty good, worldly and distinctly un-monk-like life.

 

We also stopped briefly outside Budva, another town badly damaged by the recent earthquake, and at a spot overlooking the island town of Sveti Stefan on the way back. We had been up at the crack of dawn, had a lousy lunch and a very long tiring day on the road, seen very little of interest only to get back very late in the evening to a cold supper left for us in the deserted hotel dining room, so we were not very happy.

 

However, on the whole we did enjoy or second holiday in Yugoslavia, and spent most of it in the Dubrovnik area, again visiting the nearby town of Cavtat and its hilltop mausoleum designed by Mestrovic, whose sculptures we had so admired the year before in Split.

 

We had a lovely room in the Hotel Tirena, and were very sorry to leave it because it had a little garden with a hedge all round and a tree in the middle. We used to sit out here sometimes enjoying the sun. We also ‘adopted’ a little stray cat which lived in the bushes just outside the hotel, and we used to feed it tins of sardines by the hotel entrance. When I read years later that the Hotel Tirena was one of those badly damaged by shelling in the civil war I just broke down and cried, thinking of the little cat we fed and our peaceful little garden, now possibly both destroyed by wicked, evil men fighting over their silly little border squabbles.

 

I have come to believe it doesn’t matter one hoot whether you live in a country called Yugoslavia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia or even if you are swallowed up by the Soviet Union or the Third Reich. The important thing is we are all people, and nothing is worth going to war over. Even if Nazi Germany had invaded Britain in 1941, we’d have been back to normal years ago. No regime lasts forever, and by fraternizing with the occupying power’s soldiers and people at every possible opportunity, enmity can be broken down. It is only hatred of an enemy who fights back which sustains the will to conquer and destroy, and feeds acts of vengeance and retribution. If the Nazis had won the last War we would now be living in a united Europe dominated by Germany with a single currency, precisely what is happening in any case.

 

I also think repressed sexual desires have a part to play in war. In my view war and violence are heterosexual men’s ways of dealing with their repressed homoerotic fantasies, substituting the horrific penetration of the bayonet and bullet for the sexual equivalent. The male-bonding which exists among all fighting armies, and the brutal rape of women and inhuman treatment of ‘enemy’ soldiers  and civilians are possibly all part of this sexual frustration and repressed homosexuality: the need to prove one is a big butch brutal man is carried to its extreme in war, and sado-machistic fantasies carried out to extreme on unwilling victims in all out war situations. All that is really needed to solve disputes is to sit round a table and talk, compromise and come to a deal. This always happens in the end anyway.

 

Horrors like the Nazi concentration camps and the extermination of millions of Jews, gays, gipsies and others were not prevented by war, and may well have been caused by it. (The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the resistance put up led directly to the adoption of the Final Solution for the Jewish question, since Bolshevism was seen by the Nazis as a Jewish conspiracy.) Atrocities are much easier to conceal or justify in an all-out war situation. In any case the worst horrors of the Nazi concentration camps could have been avoided if the allied governments had accepted all refugees from the Third Reich until the regime collapsed, as it was sure to do eventually as it spread its resources wider and wider.

 

In any case potential victims could have been saved by means short of all-out war on a whole population, even if this did involve discriminate killing and violence against those about to commit atrocities or ordering them to be committed. It should be remembered that the evil crimes committed by British RAF pilots against the citizens of Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin, and by the United States air force against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are every bit as bad as what the Nazis or Japanese did in their concentration and prisoner of war camps. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and war is never, ever right. I’d rather commit suicide than kill an innocent person or ordinary conscripted soldier. 2000 years after Christ told Peter to put away his sword and forgave his executioners as he was being crucified, his so-called followers have, by and large, ignored his message of non-violence, love and passive self-sacrifice. Teachers of other faiths and cultures, such as Buddha and Ghandi, have taught a similar message which still goes unheeded by most people.

 

Remember why Britain went to War with Germany in 1939 – because Poland had been invaded by the Third Reich, and after Czechoslovakia had also been invaded and Austria annexed. After 6 years of all-out war, millions of dead (the fate of those in the concentration camps was sealed as soon as War broke out . Hitler didn’t dare adopt the Final Solution in the years he was in power before the War), destroyed cities all over the world and guess what – Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria were still occupied, just exchanging Stalin for Hitler. Hardly a brilliant success. No other war in history has been any more successful, always sowing the seeds of future conflicts. There wouldn’t even have been a Hitler or Second World War if it hadn’t been for the unfair treaties imposed on Germany after the First World War. The Second World War led to the division of Europe, the Berlin Wall and the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. A total disaster in my book. The Yugoslav civil war was the same – hundreds of thousands massacred by all sides, all in the name of nationalism and independence, and in the end they’ll all have to come together in a federal European Union for their economic survival, as will the Baltic states and other former Soviet European republics.

 

In this day and age Europe should all be united in a huge federation, and individual nation states should disappear. All the continents should also be joined together in a confederal world union, and a United Nations or world government police force should replace all national armies and have the power to intervene anywhere and arrest, try and detain all dictators and warmongers like any other common criminals. National sovereignty is a dangerous, outmoded concept and should be abolished. We must unite and live together peacefully in order to break out of this vicious circle and progress to better things.

 

I do not apologize for this political and essentially pacifist diversion, since it is entirely appropriate at this point. A beautiful country like Yugoslavia and its people were torn apart by senseless war and nationalism, and the same happened in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. I can now never go back to any of the six states which once made up the former Yugoslav federation. Apart from the landmines and other relics of war contaminating the area, I could not feel happy and relaxed in places where the people committed such horrible atrocities against each other. Perhaps in 30 years when a new generation has grown up and learned to live with their neighbors again I shall go back in my old age.

 

After we got back from Yugoslavia in mid-July we had a quiet couple of months, with just the odd visit to the National Theatre and a one day trip to Brighton with my mother. At the end of September we went for a weekend break taking in Chester, Blackpool and the Lake District. We thoroughly enjoyed walking around Chester again with its unique shopping center, and we always enjoyed Blackpool and the illuminations. I don’t remember seeing much of the Lake District on this trip, probably the weather was too misty, but we discovered the delightful inland resort of Matlock Bath with its river, shops and cable car on the way back home from Blackpool by coach.

 

We paid a couple of visits to the Donmar Warehouse theater in Covent Garden, to see the drag revue Bloolips in their latest production and later the gay comedian, Simon Fanshawe, who was brilliant. Throughout the show he sent up a couple in the audience who were silly enough to admit they voted Tory, and George particularly liked a quip he made about Maggie Thatcher being so far up Reagan’s backside she was showing up in the X-rays.

 

Also during October we paid a rare visit to my aunt and uncle in Welwyn Garden City, and met up again with our Polish friend, Barbara, on one of her visits to London. Rose also came up from Hastings to London to stay with us for the weekend. A memorable theater visit that month was a play about Joe Orton called ‘Diary of a Somebody’ performed at The Boulevard Theatre in the heart of Soho near Raymond’s Revue Bar.

 

In November we went on a long weekend to Amsterdam, visiting Bruges on the way back. This was a particularly memorable visit as we had a likeable woman courier on the coach who was rather camp. We also went by our favorite ferry company, Sally Line, and enjoyed their smorgasbord restaurant.

 

In Amsterdam we went on the inevitable canal trip, and also visited the gay monument. Of course we wouldn’t ever visit Amsterdam without calling on our friends, the stray cats on the Poesenboot (the cats’ boat) moored on one of the canals.

 

The weather was cold and miserable in Bruges, where we stopped on the way back, but we did a little tour, bought some delicious Belgian chocolates and had a coffee in the main square.

 

Towards the end of November we visited George’s Oxfam friend, Rita, and her daughter and grandson. We kept in touch over the years, and Rita and her daughter were witnesses to our Wills in which we left everything to each other and to Oxfam if we both died together (though I also left my mum a small legacy). These Wills were home-made affairs typed on telex paper, and Rita and Ann witnessed them in the cafeteria of the Royal Festival Hall one day. Unofficial as they looked they did the trick, and enabled me to get George’s bank balance transferred to my account to pay for his funeral expenses when he died. I have kept in touch with Rita and Ann since.

 

In December we went down to Hastings to see Rose and Neil, but for Christmas we were off with our friend Andre to Switzerland by way of Brussels and Luxemburg.

 

Leaving on December 23rd, we arrived in Brussels for overnight, and strolled round the main square where they had a Christmas tree and an impressive crib. We also looked round the red light district, and discovered it was a much smaller, tamer version of Amsterdam with the girls sitting in the windows. Our Brussels hotel suite was spacious and luxurious with color television in the lounge and a separate bedroom, with electric candle-light fittings on the wall, and our windows overlooked a main street. Outside the illuminations included a skyscraper with lights left on in the windows to form a gigantic Christmas tree.

 

We made a brief stop in Luxemburg City, but it was too overcast and misty to see much. We drove on through France and into Switzerland to Lucerne, where we were stopping for two nights.

 

On Christmas Day we went on a boat trip on Lake Lucerne, and visited the famous lion rock carving in a cliff face. Andre was feeling under the weather so didn’t get off the boat to look at this unusual sculpture. He retired to his bed for the rest of the day when we got back to the hotel, and didn’t even come down to Christmas dinner, which was fairly ordinary and nothing like an English Yuletide feast.

 

This was the first of several holidays we spent abroad at Christmas. George disliked the festive season and all the hype, not least because his mother had died at that time of year, so we started to go abroad to get away from it all. It usually worked out one year abroad, and the next year at home so I could be with my mother at Christmas.

 

In Switzerland, I also went on a trip to Engelberg and up the cable car to the top of Mount Titlis on Christmas Day. It was certainly very Christmassy seeing all that snow on the mountains.

 

Next day Andre was feeling better as we headed west for Berne, stopping briefly on the way in a picturesque Alpine village called Brienz. We lunched in Berne, and had plenty of time to explore this fascinating old city with its shops and famous live bears, living in an enclosure by the bridge across the river. We were very impressed with the arcaded old main shopping street, with its clock tower, statues, etc..

 

We arrived in Lausanne for our overnight stop in darkness. Andre was determined to have a look around the big shops before they closed, so we made a frantic dash to the big department stores. Next day, the 27th, we headed north through France for Paris, where we had another two nights before returning to London on the 29th.

 

We loved the Christmas decorations in the Champs Elysee, and vowed to come back again at Christmas. We never did. We booked up for Christmas 1991 over a year in advance, but George never lived to see this trip, so I went with my mother instead and we lit a candle for George in Sacre Coeur, a church we always visited on our Paris trips.

 

We also visited it on this occasion, perched on a hill in the Montmarte area, and  Notre Dame, the Paris opera and other places on the usual tourist route. We only had one full day, so were limited by time. Andre and I were at the time learning French in the same class, and were using a book which dealt with fictitious characters living in a street in Paris. We decided to go and look at this real street and see how it compared with the drawings in our book. It was very similar, and at least we visited a part of the city none of us knew very well.

 

Our hotel was a modern skyscraper block (where four years later I stayed with my mother), but the room was tiny, especially when compared with our suite in Brussels. We went down to the Reception and complained that there were only two single beds for three people, and they patiently explained that the third bed pulled out from under one of the other beds. We went back up and discovered this was true, but when all three beds were down there wasn’t an inch of room between them to stand in; the room was filled wall to wall with beds.

 

 We took Andre to our favorite French self-service cafeteria chain, the Flunch, which we first discovered in Nice. The walls were decorated with framed posters, including those advertising George’s favorite French films, Marcel Pagnol’s ‘Marius Trilogy’. George used smaller reproductions of these in his collage at home. He wrote the BBC begging them to screen the films so he could ‘see them one more time before he died’. I thought this sounded very melodramatic, but four years later he was dead. He got a sympathetic letter back, and indeed the films were shown one Christmas when we were away, but we managed to obtain videos from someone where I worked, so George and I got to see these marvelous three films together.

 

In the Flunch we had a very good meal, and then Andre treated us all to delicious ice-cream sundaes from their dessert counter. Andre was delighted with this little gem of a self-service we had introduced him to, as usually he made do with McDonalds when abroad.

 

We arrived back in London to see the old year out. We had certainly traveled abroad a lot in 1987: I went to Cyprus with my mother, and George and I visited Gibraltar, Spain, Yugoslavia, Belgium (twice), Holland, Luxemburg, Switzerland and France. 9 countries on 5 separate trips - it was almost as if we were trying to pack as much in as possible in the few years together we had left, but it was not planned like that, at least not by myself. In 1987 George had no symptoms whatsoever as far as I remember, and with current medical skills, had no real cause to believe he wouldn’t live to a ripe old age despite the heart trouble in his family.

 

In January of 1988 there was a gay march through central London. I believe this may have been the demonstration which so disgusted us we stopped going on gay marches after that. For Gay Pride we would just turn up at Kennington Park for the Pride Festival and to see the march arrive. It was the silly and downright offensive slogans and songs shouted and sung by some militant exhibitionists which made us so angry. Here we were trying to win over the general public, and these idiotic people were shouting out obscenities just meant to shock. Heterosexual people don’t go on marches and shout out in great detail in front of tourists and children what they get up to in bed, so why should homosexuals, particularly if we are trying to combat prejudice and win over a hostile public? Amongst the brilliant political slogans being shouted out by these overgrown school girls and boys on this march (‘look how naughty we are’) were: ‘We lick labia, we suck dick’. George and I were ashamed to be associated with such childish and offensive behavior. Doing such things in the privacy of your home or a gay club or cruising area at night is one thing, shouting  it out in Piccadilly Circus is quite another.

 

The other slogans were just plain daft: ‘We’re here, we’re queer and we’re NOT going shopping’ was the favorite. I remember one middle-aged queen denying she was going shopping so emphatically, emphasizing it with clenched fists and real feeling, that one would be excused for thinking she had just uttered some Earth-shattering statement. George and I could only agree with the first two words of the slogan: we were definitely there, though half-wished we weren’t; we were most definitely not queer but gay, having fought prejudice and offensive terms like that for years; and whether we were going shopping after the march or not seemed totally irrelevant. We’d much rather have said or preferably sung a message to the effect that we were here, gay and went shopping, watched Coronation Street, loved our cat and did all the ordinary boring little things everyone else did.

 

Two weeks later there was a Palestinian demonstration. We went on several of these, usually meeting up with our friend Andre at Marble Arch. A woman friend of his called Georgina came along on at least one of these. This was the start of the intifada, and George, myself and Andre were all very pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist. George indeed subscribed to an organization called Medical Aid for Palestinians, and received their bulletins regularly. For us, Zionists and Nazis were two sides of the same coin: both were racist, believing in a ‘chosen’ or ‘master’ race which trampled on the rights of all others.

 

To us it was obscene for middle-class American, British and other Jews to claim a right to live in Palestine just because their ancestors lived there thousands of years ago. What chaos the world would be in if everyone claimed similar rights. As to the Holocaust, gays and gipsies, among others, also died in the Nazi concentration camps, but no-one ever offered them homelands. Israel was a great mistake, but now it seemed we were stuck with it, at least the Palestinians must also be given a state of their own.

 

In February we went to Amsterdam for a long weekend, taking our friend Rose with us. We were staying in an hotel near the Rijks Museum, and we showed Rose all our favorite Amsterdam sights, including the Poesenboot with all its stray cats. Rose loved that as much as we did, and we all gave a donation for this unique floating cat sanctuary. We also visited the gay monument, and showed Rose the red light district. We went to our favorite self-service cafeteria in a department store in one of the main pedestrian shopping streets, and as George and I sat down Rose came rushing up to our table straight from the red light district and proceeded to excitedly tell us what he had seen a little Pekinese dog doing to its nude lady owner in one of the illuminated windows, whilst crowds of men stood round watching. Rose had never been to Amsterdam before and just couldn’t believe it, but it was all too much for a poor woman on the next table who was put right off her meal by Rose’s lurid description, and got up and walked out, leaving her meal unfinished. It was the second time one of our friends had this effect. Our friend Stanley had once driven away a diner from a pub behind Marble Arch by describing a scene where he was entertaining a gentleman whose dog decided to get in on the action. Stan had taken elocution lessons, and announced in a loud, over-correct, precise voice: ‘I will NOT have a dog licking my BUM’. In Amsterdam, as George pointed out to Rose, everyone spoke English, so the reaction of the woman to Rose’s outburst was quite understandable.

 

In the evening we set out to go clubbing, and caught a tram into the center. As we walked towards our favorite gay club and were telling Rose about a gay cinema and all the other clubs in the vicinity, he suddenly announced that he had left all his money in the hotel room. George was absolutely furious. We had arranged all the holiday and made sure Rose changed enough money into guilders, this was our big night out in Amsterdam and he had not brought any money with him.

 

Fortunately, most of the clubs in Amsterdam are free or very cheap, so George lent Rose enough for the evening. Next day Rose spent some on magazines such as you could never buy in England at the time. We advised him to post them back to England to avoid trouble with the Customs. Even so it was advisable to address them to a non-existent person in case of trouble. Why on Earth should British Customs bother about material for and by consenting adults bought perfectly legally across the counter in a fellow European Community country? It just did’t make sense. Coming back to the UK from almost any country in Eastern Europe, or from New York, San Francisco or Sydney, was like stepping back 100 years into a Victorian time-warp where the nanny state looked after the nation’s morals, not because it knew best, but because it was an easy way to get convictions, and so much less trouble than trying to catch real criminals.  (At last in the early 21^st century Britain’s pornography laws have been brought into line with other civilized countries with the introduction of the R18 classification for flims/videos/DVDs.)

 

We had a nice break in Amsterdam, and were sorry to leave our cozy, curious L-shaped room (a rectangular room with a very narrow, deep alcove or corridor only wide enough for one person leading to the window) and return home. Another year of travels had started. Next month we were off to Italy.

 

It was exactly four weeks later we flew from Gatwick to Milan airport to begin our tour of Italy. We saw nothing of Milan itself, but boarded a coach headed straight for Venice.

 

It had been a long while since we had visited Italy, but as we made our first meal stop en route we discovered with a shock how much had changed in the intervening years. From being one of the cheapest countries in Europe, it had become one of the most expensive. We just couldn’t believe the price of the food in the cafeteria; about three times what we had expected based on previous visits. Luckily, we had brought extra money with us, but we had to be careful since prices were now much higher than at home instead of much lower.

 

We arrived at our ‘Venice’ hotel in darkness. It was isolated in a country lane on the mainland, with no sign of any neighboring buildings let alone a city. Everything for miles around was pitch black. We discovered there was a bus into Venice, but it would involve a walk along the unlit country lane to the nearest bus stop.

 

Of course the tour coach took us into Venice the next day, and we soon found out about the local buses. Venice itself has no road traffic, but buses, coaches and motor transport all cross the lagoon bridge and stop at the entrance to this unique city on the water, within a few minutes’ walk of the Grand Canal water-bus stops.

 

Of course we had been to Venice before, but we made return visits to our favorite spots and the little self service restaurant by the Grand Canal which we always visited. We noticed on this trip that dark green overcoats were very much in fashion for Venetian men - St Mark’s Square was full of them. Years later we used to see British Government Minister Douglas Hurd on the TV news wearing a similar coat, and guessed he must have gone on a shopping spree during a visit to Venice.

 

After two nights we were headed south to Rome, stopping at the tiny Republic of San Marino on the way. This was to have been one of the highlights of the holiday for us, since it was one of the few corners of Europe we had never actually visited before.

 

To our great disappointment our stopover in San Marino turned out to be only a one-hour lunch stop, and we had to forego lunch and dash around like mad things to try and see as much of the hill-top town of San Marino and its view of the surrounding statelet as possible.

 

Since we wanted to post our cards here with San Marino stamps, we had to spend some of this precious hour queuing up in the post office behind other tourists with a similar idea.

 

We arrived in Rome later that day, again staying in an hotel on the outskirts of the city. I believe this is the occasion we stayed in an hotel in another isolated lane, with a gipsy encampment opposite. When one of the tourist’s cameras went missing the poor gipsies were blamed, though there was such high security at the hotel, including security guards and an electronic gate, George and I felt the gipsies most unlikely culprits.

 

Unknown to us, this was to be our last visit together to this city, and we again saw The Coliseum, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, Vittoria Emmanuel Monument and St Peter’s. This time George took me up to the dome of the latter, which involved a walk across the roof. I had never been up there before, but George had when he visited Rome with Eric some time before. From this vantage point you had excellent views of St Peter’s Piazza and the Vatican gardens at the rear.

 

Our coach also took us up one of the Seven Hills of Rome for a view over the city. On our own we discovered some highly original and unusual sculptures on a little island in the river. The artist had a studio workshop by the bridge, and his or her dramatic elongated figures cast in black metal made a huge impression on us. We leant through the fence to take as many pictures as we could, because the studio was not open to the public, at least not when we were there.

 

After three nights in Rome, we headed north again to Florence by way of Pisa, a town we had not visited before. This was another highlight for us, and we were lucky to be able to climb up the famous leaning tower, which was a very eerie sensation. A short while later it was closed to the public for several years till the foundations were made more secure in order to halt the increasing tilt.

 

We took lots of pictures of the leaning tower and the accompanying buildings, and some from the top of the tower. Although not very high, if you suffered from vertigo it would not be a good idea to climb up it because the tilt and lack of any safety railings on most floors made you feel you could easily slide off.

 

Later we arrived in Signa, a town outside Florence which was to be our base for the last two nights. Again we felt cheated, since we had expected to be in Florence, but in actual fact we were better off staying right outside Florence than if we had been in the suburbs. There was an excellent train service right into the center of Florence from Signa, which only took a few minutes.

 

Signa itself was divided by the river from Lastra a Signa, and was quite a pleasant little place to stay. The hotel had a self service ‘eat as much as you like’ restaurant (meals were included in the price of our holiday), and when we arrived a party of American students were making absolute pigs of themselves piling up their plates with salads and pastas over and over again. We certainly indulged ourselves, but not to that extent.

 

There was a lot of reconstruction work going on in central Florence, and some of the old buildings were covered in scaffolding. But we revisited the cathedral and surrounding area, and crossed the famous bridge with buildings on it and visited a market on the other side. Near there we discovered a pleasant park with views over the city, some attractive gardens with fountains, statues and an ornamental lake, and a delightful ‘Gaudiesque’ art nouveau grotto in one corner of the park.

 

The Sunday after we arrived was my birthday, and this also was the day our coach took us back to Milan airport for the plane home. It has been a good week’s holiday, and there was another trip abroad to come the following month.

 

Three weeks after returning from Italy we flew off from Luton airport to Lloret de Mar in Spain. We had been there once before in the late 1970s, but we were to visit it many times in our last few years together.

 

Before writing about this trip, though, I will catch up on some more domestic matters. Our cat, Dixie, which we had as a kitten in 1971, sadly got ill in 1986. He had a bad tooth which was causing him distress, and we took him to the Blue Cross where they warned us that an anesthetic at the age of fifteen was very dangerous for a cat. However the animal was in pain, so we didn’t have much choice. Dixie had the operation on my birthday, and they kept him there a few days for observation. He seemed to have recovered well, but must have suffered a stroke, because a few days after he was back home his back legs started to become paralyzed. We had to have him put down eventually, as he could only move by dragging his back legs behind him, and couldn’t climb on to the armchair unaided. When I came home from work and found he had crawled behind the TV set to die, I knew we had to put him out of his misery.

 

Some time after this heartbreak, my mother gave us a ginger cat, but we did not feel ready for it, nor did we feel it was the right cat for us. My mother then acquired a sickly little tabby cat, and one day when we were visiting her and it had gone under some furniture to hide, George put his hand under to stroke it, and with the unique affinity he had for animals, declared we had been given the wrong cat. The little creature reacted to George’s hand with such love, that George felt it was begging for rescue, and George decided the sickly little creature belonged with us, and the robust ginger tom belonged with my mother. He was right, and soon we did the swop.

 

It worked out better for all concerned. The tabby cat, which we named Trixie, didn’t like going out much, and was frightened of my mother’s loud voice and bustling ways. The ginger cat felt imprisoned in our first floor flat, and loved my mother’s gardens back and front. He was quite happy with my mother, and the more sensitive Trixie was happy with us. We had always been prejudiced against female cats, believing them to be over-protective of their young and spiteful, but Trixie proved to us how affectionate female cats can be. It taught us both a lesson about sexism and misogyny.

Trixie never was in good health though, and after two years she too succumbed to a similar back-limb paralysis as Dixie (one can’t help wondering whether the feline equivalent of BSE or mad cow disease had something to do with these two cats dying of similar symptoms within a few years of each other.)  We took her to the Blue Cross many times, and they said she was dehydrating and gave her huge injections of liquid. We even tried to feed her water with a special syringe they gave us, but in the end we had to admit it was hopeless. Again we paid a visit to the Blue Cross to have a loved pet put down, and as we sat in tears a lady in the waiting room to whom we told the sad story comforted us with the words:

 

‘Well, you didn’t have her long, but at least you gave her a good home for the last two years of her life’.

 

Similarly, I suppose I could also comfort myself with the thought that for 21 years George and I shared security, love and a degree of happiness together, even though it was not to last the normal span of a life-long relationship. (I say ‘a degree of happiness’ because how happy can one be in this troubled world with its wars, famines, diseases, crime and human rights violations of all kinds?)

 

After Trixie we didn’t have another cat until late 1990, but the woman beneath us had several cats (she used to take in strays) and George used to throw tidbits down to them in their garden from our kitchen window. They used to look up expectantly whenever he appeared at the window, and one of them, a ginger tom, used to come up and visit us.

 

Around this time, the late 1980s, George started his collages which still decorate two rooms of our flat, and a large storeroom/cupboard. He got the idea from when he used to work at Amnesty International and decorated the office with theater posters.

George spent hours on these collages, and constantly changed them. The one in the toilet had a movie theme, and the one in our music/writing room/spare bedroom had a musical theme. I will let George describe this hobby in his own words in an article he wrote when a TV production company came to film the collages in late 1990 for Channel 4's gay ‘Out’ series:

 

‘Creating Collages:

 

‘When we first moved into our present flat, all the walls were newly painted white, which was rather clinical. Since neither of us are adept at interior decorating, wallpapering or painting, I decided to create some contrast with a collage in the spare room which we use to play our music in. Since I thought it would be a good idea to cover the wall with pop/musical images which reflected each of our musical tastes and the artists we admire, I bought two books containing reproductions of some of the most popular and artistic record sleeves to start filling the wall-space, along with actual record album sleeves, postcards, photos and images/designs with a mainly musical theme I titled “Fame”. I cut out and collected advertisements for records and pictures from magazines which appealed to our type of tastes.

 

‘I continuously add to and alter the walls according to new material I come across in junk mail ads or second-hand shops. Pictures can easily be taken off and affixed with Blu-Tak. This also alleviates any boredom from constant images and creates an element of surprise and change. I also try to create corner sections with a particular theme/connection/artist, e.g. drag queens of the past and present on the gay scene such as Marc Fleming, Mrs Shufflewick, Dockyard Doris, Lily Savage, Bloolips, etc. (Danny La Rue is not included). There are also screen and stage legends who inspire and resemble drag queens rather than women by their outrageous attire, such as Carmen Miranda, Mae West, Dorothy Squires, etc. Also artists with a huge gay following, such as Judy Garland, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Elton John, Jimmy Somerville, Boy George, etc.. I have also tried to cover catholicism and diversity of our wide taste in music from every decade from the 20s-80s including jazz, rock’n’roll, c&w, classical, sixties/seventies psychedelia sounds (Stones, Beatles, Pink Floyd, etc.), to the pop stars recording today such as Billy Idol, Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, etc..

 

‘It is an inexpensive and ideal way to add design to a wall if you are useless at wallpapering, etc.. Also it is ideal camouflage if a wall has cracks or stains to conceal the offending sections with a strategically-placed picture/photo. I like to add balance by using contrasting colours and shapes to create a more artistic whole and to leave space between each image so that a cluttered claustrophobic impression is avoided. (I once saw a photo of the collage that Joe Orton’s lover created in their cell-like bedsitter room, and I felt it must have added to his deep depression and paranoia, since its overall impression reminded me of a Gothic nightmare, with every inch of space crammed with overlapped historical pictures (stolen from Islington library books).

 

‘The second collage I created in our flat is in the loo. It came to me completely by accident when I first put up the now legendary anti-nuclear war poster which portrayed Thatcher and Reagan as Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable look-alikes, based on the original poster for “Gone with the Wind”. A friend visiting from Poland who was unaware of the source/connection of this piece of political/cinematic parody gave me the idea of purchasing a postcard of the original film poster to put underneath the large one so that others would be in no doubt of the similarities. Whilst in the shop I saw some other postcards from films I liked/admired and the idea of a cinematic collage came to me. Since we are both film buffs as are all our friends it seemed ideal to collect some photos, postcards, and posters to illustrate our love of movies old and new. Again junk mail, adverts from TV and movie magazines containing photos of videos and films for sale provided free material to use, as well as a second-hand book of 30s posters I found in a local Oxfam shop for the bargain price of £2. Again I tried to create sections where possible with continuity and recurrent themes, such as a corner of Divine movies, Marilyn pics, Dietrich posters, etc.. When a friend sent a birthday card of the gay cult U.S. painting of Montgomery Clift and James Dean affectionately cuddling/comforting each other, I used it as a centrepiece to surround it with James Dean movie postcards and cut-outs of the allegedly gay lovers. I have given this cinematic collage the theme title/slogan “Shit With The Stars” much to the consternation of my partner’s mother who has a hang-up about seeing four-letter words in print yet paradoxically uses them in her everyday oral vocabulary.

 

‘In both collages there are touches of humour, such as the placing of Dolly Parton’s boobs next to a Pink Floyd LP sleeve containing a cow with huge udders. The Divine single sleeve “Twisting The Night Away” is next to an album by “Twisted Sister”, and a small picture of an album called “‘This Is Why You’re Overweight” under an image of a huge chocolate egg: whilst adding a final suggestive pop-artist painting of Divine’s legs straddling an elephant’s trunk between her legs as the ultimate phallic symbol. Some of the placing is so subtle it needs a conducted tour, or careful study to discover the connecting themes.

 

‘Again I alter/change pieces as I come across new material or dispose of old pictures because they have become tatty or tiring. It is a rather therapeutic occupation which prevents boredom or depression taking over, like creating your own giant jigsaw using apparently disparate pieces that eventually join/fuse together into a collective whole on the wall (pardon the pun).

 

‘The inspiration for my first collage came to me when I worked at Amnesty International. On first taking over the office allocated to me, the walls were completely covered with posters and images about torture, the death penalty, and other human rights abuses being inflicted on prisoners of conscience throughout the world. Partly because I felt the posters were preaching to the already converted members of Amnesty, and because I was continually telecommunicating press releases, Urgent Action case-sheets on the horrors inflicted by inhuman regimes, I felt I didn’t need to be surrounded by spectres of political dictators looking down on me during my working day. So I replaced them with theatre playbills (free from theatre foyers and booking agents), film poster postcards, photos of art and architecture that I liked or admire, etc.. It soon became a special event for all new staff/volunteers/visitors to be shown round my office to admire the artistic, theatrical and cinematic effects. I recommend anyone to alter boring workplace walls with images that reflect their personality and tastes. All you need are a pair of scissors, Blue-Tak and of course the actual material, which you can find in magazines, Sunday supplements, advertisements, second-hand book and record shops, etc.. So if you want an alternative decor/design that is neither affluent, piss-elegant, expensive or pretentious, I suggest you conjure up something along these lines. We spend so many hours of our lives in our working and domestic environment that we should create a collection of images we can identify with and which reflects our personalities and tastes. Why surround ourselves or stare at blank walls or inane repetitious wallpaper patterns which after a period have the hypnotic/hallucinatory effect known in psychology/psychiatry as the Rorschach test when suggestive patients see butterflies or boobs in ink-blurbs.’

 

Well, having caught up with our cats and collages, on to our Spanish holiday in Lloret. Early on a Monday in April we flew off from Luton Airport to Lloret de Mar. Our previous visit had been ten years before at the end of a coach tour of southeastern Spain including Andorra and Catalonia. However during this holiday a decade later we fell in love with Lloret, so much we returned a few months later and then went back every year.

 

The reason we liked it so much was that it summed up what both of us liked about holidays. I liked the beach and swimming, and also city sightseeing. George liked city sightseeing, shops and a lively atmosphere. Barcelona, with its fantastic architecture by Gaudi and others, was only an hour or so away by bus or train, and Lloret itself was a lively, tourist orientated town which nevertheless retained a Spanish or Catalonian flavor. There were old narrow streets still inhabited by locals, an old church with colorful mosaics on its roof, and the narrow main shopping streets had atmosphere. It was not an artificial resort like Magaluf, Benidorm or Torremolinos with huge gray skycraper hotel blocks. Added to this there was beautiful countryside around, especially on the short bus ride north to the picturesque resort of Tossa de Mar. Most gay people headed for Sitges, south of Barcelona, but we deliberately avoided gay resorts, with the exception of Amsterdam and big cities which had a thriving gay life like New York, San Francisco, Paris and Sydney. It was too much of a problem for George who needed a large supply of amphetamines to enjoy or even cope with the gay scene.

 

Although George never learned to swim, we spent considerable time on the beach, listening to our music cassettes through individual Walkman-type players (we didn’t really share the same tastes in music). It was anyway too cold in April for swimming, which was one reason we decided to make a return trip in September. Another reason was the place had an out-of-season feel in April. Many of the bars were not yet open for the summer, but we liked the atmosphere and the place so much we felt it would be worth coming back five months later. I think George felt guilty because I couldn’t get any swimming in and so promised we would come back when the Mediterranean had warmed up a bit. After that we always came in September, when most of the families with schoolchildren had stopped coming and the water was lovely and warm after months of summer sunshine.

 

We stayed at the Hotel Garbi Park, part of a complex of hotels with the name ‘Garbi’ in their title. It was just yards from the main road leading from the bus station to the sea, with an almost dried-up canal running down the center of the street. Apparently it was more impressive in winter and filled up with rainwater from the surrounding hills.

 

We went on a one-day coach trip north of Barcelona to the mountain-top monastery at Montserrat. It was a lovely sunny day, and we had a cheerful Catalonian tour guide who kept coming out with phrases like ‘okie-dokie’, even referring to his coach as the ‘okie-dokie bus’. Montserrat was a huge rock rising out of the plain, and right near the top was perched the buildings which made up the monastery. The rockface towered on two sides, and the area where the monastery was situated narrowed down to a sort of wilderness-covered gorge at one end. The other two sides gave on to magnificent views of nearby hills, the plain and a river winding far below.

 

During the coach journey to Montserrat our guide had told us about the legend of the ‘Black Madonna’ in the church attached to the monastery. Tourists were invited to file past this statue and make a wish. The guide swore blind that wishes often came true, whatever the religious beliefs of the person praying or wishing. We joined the queue and passed by the statue, and I made a secret wish that George would find a steady job and be happy. He was at the time unemployed and beginning to despair.

 

Much later (it may have been when we returned in September) George and I sat on a seat by a path overlooking the sea beneath Lloret castle and I confessed I had made this wish to the Black Madonna. George was annoyed, and said he had never had any luck since I made the wish. I think he felt it was superstitious and wrong, especially as I was not a Catholic or even a Christian.

 

I had by then made the journey from Protestant Christianity, through various bouts of agnosticism, atheism and religious revival to a sort of non-religious Spiritualism which I retain to this day. I believe Spiritualism and the paranormal are merely scientific facts obeying physical laws our present day science does not yet recognize or understand. I have difficulty believing in an all-wise, all-powerful Creator, so prefer to speak in terms of ‘the Great Spirit’ which has evolved and continues to evolve rather than an eternal unchanging ‘God’. In short, I believe life-after-death, reincarnation, progress of the soul and the Great Spirit are all scientific facts and part and parcel of the wider process of evolution which Charles Darwin only scratched the surface of. Nevertheless I respect all religions, recognizing each one is an attempt at explaining reality and imparting a moral code, and that all religions contain elements of the truth. Unfortunately, organized religion is also the cause of much of the trouble in the world.

 

I find it hard to believe the Black Madonna or my wish for George’s happiness in useful employment could have brought bad luck, but sad to say the wish did not immediately come true, though George did eventually find another job.

 

Whilst in Lloret we discovered a supermarket near the hotel where we could buy, among other things, extremely cheap alcoholic drinks. There was plonk at about fifty pence a liter in cardboard containers (on one trip we took some of these home in our suitcase, and one of the boxes of red wine leaked making a terrible mess. Everything had to be bleached to try to get the stains out.) There was also locally made gin with the most extraordinary names. I have a photo of George holding up his favorite because it was the cheapest. It was taken on our balcony overlooking the Co-op supermarket where we bought it, and depicts George smiling with a glass of gin in one hand, holding the bottle in the other and pointing to the label reading: ‘Green Fish Gin’. This is one reason we were so very close, we shared a similar philosophy in life and hated piss-elegance and snobbery in all its forms.  We both had an eye for a bargain, and delighted in the thought of how horrified many people would be that we could swig down a cheap gin called ‘Green Fish’ at three or four pounds a liter.

 

We paid at least one visit to Barcelona and made a point of visiting as many of Gaudi’s buildings as possible. We even got on the roof of one, the fantastic ‘Casa Mila’ or ‘La Pedrera’. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of our lives, to be several stories above the Barcelona streets in a Fantasyland as weird and wonderful as the Land of Oz. We were surrounded by chimney-pots which looked like weird faces, molded windows, canopies, balconies and arches. The roof was not normally open to the public, we simply happened to be there at the right time. After George’s death I was again at the right place at the right time to visit the roof of another Gaudi building, the ‘Guell Palace’ just off The Ramblas. It was much smaller than the ‘Casa Mila’ but only slightly less fantastic and impressive.

 

Of course the most fantastic roof of all is that of the ‘Casa Batillo’ shaped like a dragon’s back, and impossible to visit because of its sloping shape, but we visited the building once again and went inside the front door for a quick look. On a subsequent occasion we ventured up the stairs, but unfortunately none of the Gaudi buildings were permanently open to the general public, nor were most included in guided tours. Yet so many foreign tourists come to see the unique art-nouveau Gaudi architecture a special ‘Gaudi tour’ would surely pay off. (Years later some of these Gaudi masterpieces, including the Pedrera roof, were permanently opened to the public.)

 

As it was we had to journey by subway to the northwestern suburbs to visit the Guell pavilions, and even then could only get close to one of the pavilions and the fantastic wrought-iron gate with its sculptured dragon, having to glimpse the other pavilion from a distance.

 

We also visited the colorful ‘Casa Vicens’ in the northern suburbs and made a return visit to the wonderful Guell Park a little further northeast. Of course we again visited Gaudi’s most famous, still not even half completed mammoth work, The Sagrada Familia cathedral.

 

We very much wanted to also visit the Guell Colony, a church outside Barcelona to the northwest, but it entailed a difficult train journey and we did not have time in the end. The various Gaudi buildings are so inaccessible and often closed to the public when you do reach them, that we really felt a Gaudi tour was desperately needed. It was almost as if London’s most interesting tourist sights, Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London, St Paul’s, Tower Bridge and The Houses of Parliament, were scattered in suburbia unpublicized and largely unvisited by tourists, and all closed to the public anyway.

 

On either this or subsequent visits to Lloret we discovered a favorite cafe and a favorite bar. The cafe was a short walk from our hotel in a side street, and was useful if we wanted a quick snack, although we got our meals at the hotel included in the price. George nicknamed the rather large man who ran the cafe ‘Big Eggo’ after the old Beano comic character because as we were sitting there one day he saw the man lift a fried egg from the hotplate with the spatula, let it slide into his mouth and then gulp it down whole. Unfortunately I had my back to the counter so missed this amazing display. After that we called the cafe ‘Big Eggo’s’.

 

The bar we named the Cafe Berlin, though it was in fact across the road from the real Cafe Berlin at a little crossroads on a square near where we had stayed on our first visit to Lloret in 1978. It was largely frequented by British tourists, and often featured a rather plump English singer called, I believe, Sabrina. The bar owner appeared to us to be gay, but we could have been mistaken. It was a good place for a cheap evening’s entertainment.

 

A week after arriving in Lloret, we flew back to Luton, having made our minds to return in September. Despite being early Spring and too cold for swimming, it had been a lovely holiday.

 

In the week after we came back we were invited to a dinner at the Australian company where we both used to work, which was going into virtual liquidation.  On the Friday after that we were expecting an ex-colleague from this firm to come to dinner. George went to meet Sharon at South Kensington tube station to bring her to our flat, where George and I had spent ages tidying up and preparing a meal for her. I believe George had made his special cauliflower soup, and certainly we had gone to a lot of trouble. Sharon had recently returned from a lengthy trip around the world, with several months in Australia and the Far East, and we were dying to hear all about it. After George had left for the Tube station to meet her, Sharon rang up to say she was sorry but she couldn’t make it after all. Eventually George rang me from the station to say she hadn’t arrived yet, and I had to break the news. He came home dejected and bitterly disappointed, vowing never to speak to Sharon again. She was very offhand about it, and surely couldn’t have realized all the trouble we had gone to preparing for her visit. We miserably sat and ate all the food we had prepared by ourselves. Next day we visited Rose in Hastings.

 

In the middle of May I went on my very first Rock’n’Roll Weekender, staying with my friend Charlie and some of his friends on a caravan holiday camp site near Weymouth. Charlie and his mates worked on the railway, and were all much younger than me.

 

We met at Waterloo and traveled down by train together. Besides Charlie and myself there were two Anglo-Indians, one of whom was later in the fatal car crash which killed Charlie. There were also two beautiful blond brothers whom I fancied like crazy. Ian I already knew, but his younger brother turned out to be even more gorgeous. It was all I could do to keep my hands off them both, especially as they went around most of the time with their shirts off. Sadly, Ian has since died after being involved in another fatal car crash which left him in a coma for months.

 

It was a good weekend and I really enjoyed it. Unknown to me it was to be one of the last times I saw Charlie alive, and certainly the last chance I had to sit down and talk with him. One night when the others were out or asleep, Charlie and I sat talking till the early hours. He would have talked all night, but eventually I said I was tired and went to bed. I wish now we had talked all night for I never got the chance again. He was a quiet, gentle man who liked his drink, did a bit of speed, loved Blues music as well as rock’n’roll and had a big black woman as a girlfriend. He also doted on his two children by Angel, and took them fishing. This was another hobby of his, though he told me that weekend he felt sorry for the fish. I think it was sitting by the river or the sea he liked more than the actual fishing. Charlie and Angel were never actually married, and had split up some time ago.

 

During that weekend things sometimes got a little wild. At one time all the others rushed to the caravan window to look at some pretty girl who was passing, and they remarked that I was the only one who remained seated and did not take any interest. Charlie knew I was gay, and I suspect most of the others did too. Certainly Ian must have known, because he had spent the night at my flat and met George. I offered Ian the choice of sharing a double bed with me or sleeping on the sofa, and he chose the sofa (much to my disappointment).

 

 

On the Saturday night Ian and his brother stripped to their underpants, put on bed sheets and said they were going out to look for a ‘Toga Party’. We all went out trooping from caravan to caravan listening for sounds of a party, Ian and his brother knocking on several doors without success. In the end we gatecrashed one little ‘party’, which is to say there were a few people sitting around drinking. After about five minutes the people in the caravan said it was a ‘gay party’ in what I suspect was a desperate effort to get us to leave, which we did, though I was of course then intrigued and wanted to stay.

 

So there were no parties, but Ian and some of the others got very drunk nevertheless. One night they all passed out and I couldn’t find anywhere to sleep. Ian’s younger brother had passed out on their double bed, so I crept in beside him. Nothing happened, but there were a few knowing glances in the morning. I had a very good excuse though, because it was the only available bed/sofa on which I could have slept.

 

Meal times were very strange because the Anglo-Indians were cooking curries on the caravan stove, and when they’d finished Charlie was cooking yams and West Indian food. I think Ian and his brother lived on chips, and I cooked my own simple meals when the others had finished.

 

The entertainment was good, and although I only went to one more Weekender before George died, it was to set a pattern I would follow after George’s death when these Weekenders not only became a way of life, but led to many lasting friendships.

 

To celebrate George’s birthday that month we went to see ‘Manon De Sources’, the Marcel Pagnol sequel to his ‘Jean De Florette’ which we had seen several months earlier. Pagnol’s ‘Marius’ trilogy, filmed much earlier, remained among George’s favorite all-time films, and the two new films of Pagnol’s works were also very highly rated by both of us.

 

According to my photo album we had managed to visit Brighton between coming back from Lloret and our next little trip, which was a weekend coach trip up North. It was the day after George’s birthday and we were off on a tour of Yorkshire called ‘The Summer Wine Tour’, because it visited the town where they filmed the TV sitcom ‘Last of the Summer Wine’. We were based in a big hotel in Bradford a few hundred yards from the National TV and Cinema Museum, to which we only managed to squeeze in a brief visit. Nearby was an impressive statue of the playwright J. B. Priestley who came from those parts. We also visited a transport museum on the boundary between Bradford and Leeds. We had hoped to have time to visit Leeds itself, but this just wasn’t possible.

 

The coach took us to Holmfirth, and we saw the cafe used in the ‘Summer Wine’ TV series and the house by the river where Norah Batty lives in the program. Not being followers of the series it didn’t mean all that much to us. We then went on to Haworth, where the Bronte sisters lived. All these Yorkshire towns were very picturesque with quaint cobbled streets. In Haworth we visited the Bronte House, and then went on a steam train ride from Haworth station which is often used by film and TV crews when they want to film a station as they looked years ago.

 

We then visited the village where they filmed ‘Emmerdale Farm’ and visited the pub used in the series. Since this was another program we never watched, that didn’t mean much to us either, but we enjoyed the Yorkshire countryside. Finally we visited a market in Halifax, in a large purpose-built enclosed courtyard with shops on three levels. We had really enjoyed this two day trip which picked us up and dropped us down at a fairly local pub. It was one of several such trips we went on which we saw advertised in our local paper.

 

George was still unemployed, but was doing voluntary work for Oxfam. He also got occasional telex work covering for a friend of ours when she was ill or on holiday. He hoped to get a permanent job out of it, and was bitterly disappointed when someone else was appointed eventually. Evidently Angel, our friend, had neglected to inform George a vacancy had occurred, or to recommend him, yet it was George who got her into telex work. Before that she had been a cleaner. As George said, he helped everyone, but they never seemed to help him in return or show any gratitude. I believe it was things like this which hastened George’s death and deprived him of the will to live. At least he had two weeks work at the end of June and beginning of July whilst Angel was on holiday.

 

Whilst George was working at Angel’s firm, he got from her the tragic news that her estranged common-law husband and father of three of her children had been killed. Charlie had been the backseat passenger in a car on a trip to Brighton, and on the way back the car had swerved off the road, hit a lamppost and Charlie, who was not wearing a seatbelt, had been thrown through the back window and killed. The driver and the passenger in the front seat (Gazi, one of the guys who had stayed in the caravan at Weymouth) were wearing seatbelts and survived with barely a scratch. The first I heard the news was when George sent me a telex from the office where he was working to mine. I could hardly believe it.

 

Angel was not just thoughtless when it came to finding George a job - the death of a man she had lived with for years seemed to have little effect on her. The night after he died she was in the local rock’n’roll pub drinking and laughing as usual, completely unconcerned about her three children left home all alone. I was amazed she was in the pub that night, and asked how the children were.

 

‘Oh, they did seem a bit upset’, she said in a puzzled tone as if this was rather surprising. OK, so they were young teenagers and not little kids, but I did think she could have stayed in the night after their father died to be with them.

 

There was the Gay Pride festival in June, and in late July we were in Hastings to see Rose. We all went to the White Rock Pavilion to see the Chas and Dave Show. It was a very good evening which we all enjoyed very much. The following weekend we went to the Hackney Empire to see a variety show of gay cabaret artistes entitled ‘The Closets’ Concert Party’. This was the way we preferred to see drag acts because George couldn’t stand the smoke in gay bars. In August, another drag highlight for us was seeing Baltimore drag star, Divine, in ‘Hairspray’, her first and last appearance in a film aimed at a mass, rather than a cult, audience.

 

Two days later I went to Charlie’s funeral with a rock’n’roll acquaintance, Jerry, who has been lead singer in various bands, and who later appeared as Cliff Richard in TV’s ‘Stars In Their Eyes’. At Angel’s house afterwards I met the driver of the car and shook his hand as warmly as I could, squeezing it with both hands, because I knew what an awful ordeal he must be going through. I later went to the inquest in Redhill, near where the accident happened, where a verdict of accidental death was recorded. The driver and Gazi said they thought they were not speeding, but that the car skidded out of control on a curve. In response to questioning the driver admitted they could have just exceeded the speed limit.

 

Only later did I learn that they may have been doing well over 100 mph at times, and that Charlie had apparently asked them to slow down. Then I did not feel quite so sympathetic to the driver. I suppose they had all been drinking. Charlie had a bottle of Tia Maria in the back seat from which he was taking swigs. Ironically, the bottle survived the crash intact. I later learned more about the driver from a friend of mine who worked on the railways. It seemed he had a very traumatic experience at a younger age which had a deep psychological effect on him, and made him into a very shy, reticent person. Again I felt sorry for him, since however much he was to blame, killing his friend in a car crash can’t have helped his psychological problems brought on by the earlier incident.

 

The day after Charlie’s funeral we took my mother on a day trip to Dunkirk by the Sally Line ferry from Ramsgate. George and I loved this ferry because of their Smorgasbord restaurant, where you could help yourself to as much as you liked. We thought it would be a real treat for my mother, but she looked distastefully at the large range of fish starters on offer, including smoked salmon, and remarked that a lot of it looked raw and she couldn’t eat raw fish. She then added insult to injury by saying the meal was very nice, rather like those she got at the annual OAP’s holiday camp vacation. We got the impression the meal was nothing special to her at all, just the usual old fare they dished out to pensioners. If that’s the case, I can’t wait to be a pensioner! (Years later I actually stayed at the holiday camp my mother mentioned, and whilst good, the self-service restaurant didn’t quite match up to the Sally Line smorgasbord.)

 

We had time whilst in Dunkirk to take a shuttle bus into the town, and to visit the famous beaches from which British troops were evacuated in the Second World War. We didn’t bother with the smorgasbord on the way back, as we were all full from the outgoing trip. My mother may not have gone overboard (excuse the pun) for this excellent self-service restaurant, but I have a delightful picture of her sitting on a seat overlooking Dunkirk beach enjoying a soft drink called ‘Schitt’. My mother and George next to her are both smiling. It was a good day out, and I think we all had a good time.

 

Sometime between the Yorkshire and the Dunkirk trips George’s sister Betty, and her granddaughter, Debbie, paid us a visit. George went with them to London Zoo, a ritual his sister often went through with various grandchildren. Debbie visited us several times, and was constantly eating sweets, crisps and lollies. We used to tease her about it.

 

We paid another visit to Hastings for the August Bank Holiday weekend. I know the first indications of George’s terminal illness were during a weekend in Hastings about three years before he died, so this may well have been the time he started to have a sore throat which didn’t clear up for months, and continual recurring mouth ulcers. It all seemed so trivial at the time, and for three years George’s GP prescribed ointment for the ulcers, and apparently never queried the underlying cause.

 

A week after our 18th anniversary we were off to Lloret again, this time taking our friend Rose and flying from Gatwick in the late afternoon.

 

We were staying at the same hotel as last time, but had a different room and table in the dining room. Nevertheless our old waitress (not serving our table this time) was very surprised to see us back so soon.

 

Our room looked out over the swimming pool at the back of the hotel. It was Rose’s first trip to Spain, and he loved it. The only thing is he does things back to front. Whereas everyone else in the world starts the day slowly, and in the evening is ready to have a drink and go out and enjoy themselves, Rose starts the day at the crack of dawn with a whisky or gin, is high as a kite all morning and on a big come-down every evening. At home he is a couch potato and sits and watches TV all evening, flicking from channel to channel to watch the beginning of one film and the end of another. Abroad he was like a fish out of water in the evenings. He would lie in bed pretending to be reading a book while George and I went out to our favorite bar. As George remarked, Rose wasn’t really reading, he just went into a sort of TV-deprived stupor, lying in the bed staring at the same page of his book for hours on end. Not once did he come to the bar with us, but I feel sure if the bars had been open with entertainment at six in the morning he’d have been ready to come out and enjoy himself.

 

Around midday, after a morning on the beach, we would call at a cafe on the front and all have a large beer. Being a daytime drinker, Rose enjoyed this, and it was a pleasant place to sit overlooking the beach, sea and promenade. Rose would eye up the waiter and give him a tip, which was his idea of flirting. Next year when we went back to Lloret without Rose we kidded him on that the waiter was asking where our friend was.

 

Rose had one successful conquest. He was in a cottage (toilet) right at the end of Lloret beach, by a little fishing cove near the castle. An old man stood beside him at the stalls, and as Rose left the old man said to him: ‘Manana’. Rose came and told us, not having a clue what the world meant. It was one of the two or three words of Spanish we knew and we explained it meant ‘tomorrow’. I don’t think the romantic assignation was ever kept, but it boosted Rose’s ego for a day or so. Actually being on the big side, Rose could have done all right for himself on the Spanish gay scene. In London years before he’d met a Spanish guy in a notorious Kings Road gay club, The Gigolo, who was just wild about Rose. The Spanish seem to like their women, and men, on the large, cuddly side. When I went back to Lloret with Rose after George died, he was just the same and didn’t want to do anything much in the evenings. He trolled around the gay cruising ground beneath the castle once or twice with me in the evening, but then went back to the hotel whilst I went to the gay bars on my own.

 

George and I never explored these in Lloret, for the reason I have already explained (he took no amphetamines with him on holiday, so couldn’t cope with sex or the gay scene). However, on this trip with Rose after he died I found one or two gay bars, one with a darkroom. The only trouble is the gay scene starts very late in Spain, and nothing happened in the darkroom till after 1 a.m.. The bars didn’t even open till midnight. It was all far too late for Rose, or rather too early. He was raring to go about 5 hours later, showing me up on the beach by camping away like mad after his morning gin.

 

On this holiday with George, we took Rose for his first visit to Barcelona, which he loved. We strolled up The Ramblas looking at the various stalls, and whenever Rose saw a statue of an attractive looking male he had to be photographed by it. He posed in The Ramblas with George by a statue of a naked youth on horseback, and in a park by the Sagrada Familia next to a fully-clothed figure of a boy. George felt it smacked of pedophilia, since the statue represented a boy of about 14, but Rose insisted so we took his photo.

 

We showed him Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece, and a couple of other Gaudi buildings on the way to the cathedral. We ended the day climbing the big hill overlooking Barcelona harbor, with the idea of catching the cable car across the harbor, but we couldn’t find the cable car station, and in the end came down by foot.

 

Another day we took Rose to picturesque Tossa de Mar, north of Lloret. There were huge waves that day, and Rose and I had a great time bathing, before we walked with George round the castle and the narrow streets of Tossa.

 

We flew back to Gatwick a week after we left. We were glad we had gone back to Spain so soon, since I could go swimming with Rose (the water now warm after the long, hot summer) and all the bars and places which were closed in April were open in September.

 

Two weeks after returning, I was off to Weymouth for my second rock’n’roll weekender, staying in a caravan with Angel, Red and their family. This meant a couple of days work for George covering for Angel at her job. I enjoyed the weekend, though the caravan was a bit hectic. Red did all the cooking, and we had to take turns for our meals.

 

Whilst I was away, George went to the Everyman cinema in Hampstead on the Sunday to see the film ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’. It was a strange film - when showing it on video to my mother and Rose long after George’s death I had to turn it off half way through because they found it so depressing. It was atmospheric rather than depressing, done in a semi-documentary style, almost like watching snippets of someone’s old home movies. The whole film was like a photograph album - not always in sequence, flashing backwards and forwards in time with little continuity. It told of the struggle of a mother to bring up her children, whilst being beaten regularly by her drunken husband who eventually dies, and how the children grow up into adolescence in the years after the Second World War. There was a lot of music in the film, all of it nostalgic and much of it sung by amateurs without any musical backing, just like a sing-song at home.

 

George absolutely loved the film, and bought the soundtrack album, the cover of which he gave a prominent place in his ‘Fame’ music collage. He found the part of the long-suffering mother very moving and brilliantly acted.

 

Three weeks later, George took me to see the film. I enjoyed it, but not as much as he did perhaps as I prefer more continuity in a film. I certainly didn’t find it as depressing as my mother and Rose did years later. It had some very funny bits in it, and the whole thing was nostalgic - a bit like the epic TV series ‘A Family At War’. This family were literally at war, with each other. One funny bit I particularly liked was when a group of young girls sung ‘Too Young’ but changed the words from 'They try to tell us we're too young' to 'They try to sell us Egg Fu-Yong’.

 

Early in November we paid a visit to the recently opened ‘Museum of The Moving Image’ on the South Bank underneath Waterloo Bridge. We had to pay to go in (which was unusual for museums in London at the time), but it was well worth it. We enjoyed the working exhibits, including snippets of old TV programs, an early Soviet train carriage converted into a mobile cinema showing propaganda films, the chance to read the news, fly like ‘Superman’ and be in a TV interview. Sadly, we did not purchase a video to keep a permanent record of these ‘TV appearances’.

 

That Christmas we went down to Hastings for what was to be our last Christmas in England together. It was a bit of a disaster, but very funny in retrospect.

 

On Christmas Day Neil was up bright and early as usual in his endearingly slow, ponderous way, but he never even dreamed of seeing to the enormous turkey he had bought. Instead he pottered about making cups of tea and spent hours cooking breakfast (a feat I could have accomplished in about 10 minutes). At 1 p.m. he was laboriously sewing up the 18lb turkey, having stuffed it. Nobody else would bother about sewing it, but he was nothing if not methodical. George and Rose had taken the dogs out for a walk, and Rose had friends from his work dropping in that evening for a drink.

 

Neil had a ritual of going to the pub at lunchtime, and Christmas Day was a must. I did some rough calculations in my head and worked out if he put the turkey in the oven then it would be ready about when Rose’s guests arrived, and they weren’t coming to dinner, only for drinks. So I said we’d better go to the pub first, and put the turkey in the oven when we came back, and have it very late (just before midnight) after Rose’s guests had gone.

 

We went to the pub on the corner, and meanwhile George and Rose came back. George groaned when he saw the turkey wasn’t even in the oven. He’d had many Christmases in Hastings surviving on corned beef and pork luncheon meat till the day after Boxing Day because nobody could be bothered cooking the turkey. Instead of Rose himself putting the turkey in the oven, he stormed off into the (straight) pub where Neil and I were sitting, surrounded by Neil’s straight friends. Rose came in screaming like a camp fishwife:

 

‘Oi, Brent!’ (Neil’s surname.) ‘What are you doing sitting ‘ere drinking? Get my bloody turkey in the oven. I’ve got friends coming round at eight’, and he stormed out again.

 

Neil bent his head low as he sipped his beer, and whispered to me:

 

‘Oh dear, dear, dear. I do wish he wouldn’t show me up like that’.

 

We continued our drinks, but a few minutes later Rose stormed in again for a repeat performance. It all culminated in a big row. Rose rang up and told his friends to cancel, and George had to comfort Neil who ended up sitting in the armchair bawling his eyes out, complaining, with considerable justification, that he had to do all the work and preparations for Christmas, and never got any thanks for it or any help from Rose.

 

It all blew over eventually. I have since discovered Rose and Neil thrive on rows and bickering, and love winding each other up, but it can be uncomfortable for visitors, or just amusing, depending on how well you know them. Nevertheless, when Rose and Neil invited us down the following year they were disappointed when we said we had made other arrangements. They pressed us, and George said that we couldn’t cope with another performance like last year. Rose and Neil genuinely didn’t seem to know what on Earth we meant; they had completely forgotten about the row which had ruined our Christmas. They’d probably had one every day since, so why should that one stick in their memory? (On a much later occasion, after Neil had suffered a stroke and was housebound because he couldn’t manage all the stairs to their maisonette and refused point blank to move, he was looking in a catalog for a suit. Rose screamed at him because Neil was always ordering stuff they couldn’t afford by mail order: ‘You don’t need a new suit, you aren’t going anywhere till they carry you out in your wooden box.’ This was typical of the way they wound each other up – shocking to a visitor, but just a part of their every day ritual. They’d be lost without it. Yet another anecdote. Rose suffers from diabetes and now has to have insulin injections daily. However he eats endless bars of chocolates and sweets, insisting he needs them to build up his sugar levels. Neil likes his marmalade, but kept the pot at his end of the table so Rose couldn’t reach it because it is not good for his diabetes. Rose leaned across and snatched the marmalade pot. I said: ‘You’re not supposed to have that, Rose, it’s got too much sugar in it.’ Rose replied: ‘I want it and I’m having it!’ My reaction was: ‘Charming! That’s what Hitler said when he invaded Poland.’)

 

We saw my mother, as always, sometime over the Christmas period when the transport was running again. On New Year’s Eve George has written in his diary ‘The Steamie’. This was a Scottish play set in Glasgow about the closure of some municipal baths, and we enjoyed it very much, especially George as it reminded him of his childhood. I believe we saw it at the Comedy Theater in the West End, but later there was a TV version.

 

In January 1989 George got a day’s work at Angel’s office when she was preparing for her annual party. Sometimes we both went, but I always popped in for an hour or so since Angel and Red’s place was only round the corner from where we lived.

 

According to George’s diary we had dinner with Andre sometime in January. He was an old friend of George’s, whom George had helped get a job. His partner, Norman, was very argumentative, and could be very heavy going. George called him a ‘verbal terrorist’ to his face, and that just about summed him up.

 

Late in January George went for an interview for what proved to be his last permanent job. It was an American engineering company, and George got the job working in their telecommunications message switching room, which involved the old telex, newer fax and latest e-mail technologies. He started work there in mid-February, and worked there about a year. The shifts were very difficult, one starting as early as 7.30 a.m.. There was no Tube where we lived, and in those days only a few trains in the morning and evening rush hours from Clapham Junction BR station to Olympia, which was still a bus ride from Hammersmith where George worked. There was no train at that time in the morning, so George had to rely on a bus, which sometimes was late or didn’t turn up. Being an American firm they were a stickler for punctuality, and the fact that George had caught the very first available transport cut no ice with them. Still George did his best, and although he found the shifts a strain, made some friends and got to quite like the job.

 

He also liked the Hammersmith area, and sometimes I met him there for lunch in the Co-op self-service restaurant, which did a great steak and kidney pie. Other times I met him after work and we went in the Safeway supermarket and did our shopping together.

 

At Easter in late March we went down to see Rose and Neil in Hastings, and in April saw his old friend Marlene. She lived in Mottingham, Southeast London, and we visited her several times. She had recently left her parents’ home after her father died and she now had a little council flat. We were not familiar with the area, so it was quite an adventure for us when we visited her. We liked the woods nearby, where we walked Marlene’s dog, but were not all that keen on the estate itself in bleak suburbia. The flat was nice, but we were urban creatures and it was too like Welwyn Garden City for our liking. Marlene was quite a character. Once she married a man from Mauritius she hardly knew just so he could stay in the UK. She never got any money for this marriage of convenience, just the short-lived promise of accommodation in a flat in Brighton whenever she wanted it, or when the authorities were coming around to check they were living together as man and wife. Soon Marlene's husband disappeared, but whilst she was still living with her parents letters kept arriving addressed to Marlene in her new married name. Not having told her parents about this marriage of convenience, they kept wondering who this 'Mrs Kim' was who they kept getting misdirected mail for! Marlene had to snatch them away, promising to 're-post them'.

 

Also in April we had a dinner date with George’s ex-Oxfam colleague Rita and her daughter Anne. They were vegetarians, and one day they turned up at our flat, and we had either forgotten they were coming or thought it was canceled. It was a Sunday, so one of us had to dash out to our local Asian shop and grab a couple of frozen vegetarian meals to put in the oven. This may well have been that visit. At least we had a microwave oven, which is useful on such occasions.

 

One Sunday in May we visited an agricultural exhibition in Hyde Park. It created a very great impression on us, and there was lots of free or cheap food, which was one of the main attractions. Parts of Hyde Park had been transformed into very rural scenes. One piece of landscaping included an artificial pond, and there were farmyard animals everywhere.

 

In mid May Neil’s sister Olive and her son paid a visit to London for one of her regular appointments at Moorfields Eye Hospital. I think George took a day’s leave from work, met up with them and took them around Docklands, according to a note in his diary.

 

In mid May also I was off to Northern Yugoslavia with my mother. George either didn’t want to come or couldn’t get the time off work. I didn’t like leaving him at home, but to cheer him and myself up I did a cartoon and put it up on the side of the cupboard in the kitchen so he’d find it when he came home from work. It showed what I would have to put up with day by day with Mum on the holiday, and depicted her grumbling about everything from the moment she got on the plane to returning home again. It appealed to George’s sense of humor and he told me he looked at it every day and had a laugh. It didn’t prove to be too far from the truth.

 

This was borne out by two photos of my mother in Yugoslavia. One was taken in our room the day we arrived, and shows her beaming with joy over the room and its balcony with a magnificent sea view. The other photo was taken the next morning in the nearby town center of Pula, and shows her with a grumpy face which clearly showed the novelty had already worn off. No doubt she found the walking a bit much, especially when the sun was shining as she can’t stand too much heat.

 

The apartments where we were staying were attractively laid out in a wooded area overlooking the sea, with a central reception and dining room block. It did involve quite a lot of walking up and down gentle slopes between our room and the dining room, reception and the local buses.

 

The town center of Pula was very historic, with many still intact Roman buildings including an arch across one of the main pedestrian shopping streets and a coliseum-type building known locally as the amphitheater. We of course visited all these, and the only way to do it was on foot. My mother took quite a few photos, often of unusual things no-one else would think of photographing. In the impressive amphitheater, for instance, she took a close-up of some weeds, or to be precise, wild flowers growing in the ruins.

 

We had several trips during our one week stay. We went to the town of Rovinj, which was quite picturesque, even though a huge, very black storm cloud came up whilst we were there and spoilt our photos. Luckily we missed most of the rain, and climbed a hill to the impressive church and walked back down the picturesque winding cobbled streets. I even found a little rocky outcrop where I had a quick dip in the sea and dried off in the sun.

 

We had another coach tip to Bled with its dramatic castle perched on top of a rock overlooking the lake. We went up the castle and sat enjoying a magnificent view of the lake with its island and the mountains around. Afterwards we came down and sat by the lakeside till it was time to go back on the coach.

 

The big trip was across the Adriatic to Venice in Italy. Unfortunately the catamaran service, which took a couple of hours, was canceled due to rough seas, so instead they took us by coach which took 6 or 7 hours each way, including stops for some excellent meals en route.

 

It was only a one day visit, so it was quite tiring. However my mother got to see Italy and the unique city on the lagoon with canals instead of streets. We wandered round St Mark’s Square, and I took her to the Rialto Bridge and the nearby self-service cafe which was a favorite of George and myself. We also went on a water-bus up the Grand Canal.

 

In one pedestrian street I came across a Salvador Dali exhibition, but unfortunately had no time to go in. However I took a photo at the entrance, which led into a room which had been laid out so that from the open doorway it was like looking at Mae West’s face. I know this sounds fantastic, but the photos prove it is true. A frame round the open doorway into the room depicts Mae’s blond tresses, two pictures on the wall form the eyes, and there is a nose-shaped mantelpiece/fireplace and Dali’s famous sofa in the shape of Mae West’s lips. Later in the year George and I were to see the very same tableau in the Dali museum in Spain, but meanwhile he saw the photos I had taken in Venice. It was probably those which decided him we would definitely make a visit to the Dali Museum on our next trip to Lloret.

 

When not on coach trips, we spent quite a bit of time on the pebbly beach near our holiday apartments. The local hazard was sea urchins, and walking across a submerged rocky outcrop one day I got loads of sea urchin spines in my foot. My mother was helping me pick them out with tweezers, when a burly man came up to us and asked if he could borrow them. I asked where he came from and he said Romania. This was before Communism had fallen in that country, and the man looked like a caricature of a bodyguard or Mafia hitman. There were three Romanians, all looking rather aloof and out of place on the beach in their dark glasses and good clothes. Two looked like well-built bodyguards and I could only assume the third man was an important Party personage in Romania, for probably no-one else would be allowed out of the country. I told my mother her tweezers were possibly being used to remove sea urchin spines from the feet of one of Ceaucescu’s henchmen.

 

In Pula was a self-service cafeteria where we had lunch once or twice, as we were staying on half-board terms. The first time I had to rescue my mother who was arguing at the cash desk.

 

‘She wants thousands from me,’ my mother whined. Rampant inflation meant the Dinar fluctuated against the pound sterling by hundreds every day, but my mother just couldn’t get the hang of it or understand that 17,000 Dinars was only about £1.

 

Three days after we got back, on Saturday May 27th, it was George’s 46th birthday and we took our friend Marlene down to Hastings for the day. I took a nice photo of George on Hungerford Bridge before we caught the train from Charing Cross. We of course met Rose (Neil at the time always spent the summers working in an hotel in Great Yarmouth), and he enjoyed showing Marlene all round the Old Town with its picturesque houses and narrow alleyways. We also went up the Castle Hill with its views over the town. It was a memorable day, and Marlene enjoyed it very much.

 

In June we went to a jumble sale at the London Apprentice, a gay pub in Shoreditch which was to become a regular haunt of mine for a few years after George’s death because of a popular backroom which opened upstairs. The following week we went to Kennington Park to see the Gay Pride march arrive and join in the Festival.

 

In early July we paid a rare visit to my aunt and uncle in Welwyn Garden City, and the following week saw our friends Lena and Frank. George’s sister Betty visited in August, and during her stay we took her over to Marlene’s flat and we all caught a bus to nearby Woolwich where we looked around the local market, and got a glimpse of the Thames Barrier.

 

Early in September we went to a preview of ‘Miss Saigon’, a musical which impressed us very much indeed. On the opening night a week or so later we were in Spain, but George closed his eyes in our hotel room and said he could see and hear the enthusiastic reception by the audience and critics. He said he could see the Asian leading lady overcome with emotion during her repeated curtain calls and holding bouquets of flowers. Whether this was psychic vision or not, he was right. The musical, written by the French composers of ‘Les Miserables’, was a huge hit which ran for years.

 

Also in early September our Polish friend, Barbara, was in England. We met up with her at my mother’s flat in Kilburn on Sunday 10th, which was George’s and my 19th anniversary (of meeting). Next day we were off to Lloret again.

 

We went to Lloret so many times it is impossible now to remember each individual visit, or what exactly happened on any particular occasion. I know that one year when we visited, possibly this one, we were booked into another hotel in the Garbi complex, just behind the Garbi Park, We chose this hotel because the meals were all self-service buffet, which we much preferred. Not only did we dislike waiter/waitress service because, as the name so aptly describes, it involves a lot of unnecessary waiting around, taking about an hour for a very simple meal, but it was often pot luck what ended up on your plate if you couldn’t actually see the food before you ordered it. I remember clearly on one occasion there was very little choice on the menu, and we plumped for something which sounded a bit more exotic than omelet. It was called ‘Croque Monsieur’, but it turned out to be nothing more than cheese on toast. On that occasion we walked out of the restaurant in disgust, leaving the Croque Monsieur untouched, and we got a decent meal in Big Eggo’s instead.

 

That was another problem with the half-board meals at the Garbi Park. They deliberately served the main meal at lunchtime, so half-board guests missed out and had to make do with just breakfast and a snack in the evening. ‘Croque Monsieur’ was the nadir of the evening meal quality, sometimes it was quite acceptable, but nevertheless it was very annoying to look on the menu for the day and see that the full-boarders had tucked into roast chicken or something similar for lunch whilst we had to make do with hamburger and chips for our only proper meal of the day in the evening.

 

At the Hotel Garbi there were lashings of food in the self service restaurant. You could help yourself to as much as you liked of soup and salad before you even started your main course. We loved it, especially as George was so fussy about what he ate so anything that looked even slightly suspect or had a whiff of garlic or onion he could avoid like the plague before it landed in front of him on his plate. The only trouble about the hotel was the room they gave us. We had a view of a whitewashed blank wall, for our window was set in an alcove of the hotel. We didn’t even have a balcony. It was very depressing.

 

Luckily for us, they decided to close the Hotel Garbi early that season, so I think it was nearly a week into the holiday they moved us to our old hotel, the Hotel Garbi Park next door. I believe they had a couple of meals a week self service or buffet style, which was an improvement on previous years when it was all waitress service. George accurately forecast that in future years it would all be buffet style, and he was right, but not till after he had died unfortunately.

 

We put up with the waitress served meals and were well compensated by a nice room with a balcony and a good view. It makes all the difference to a holiday, as a depressing room can be a real downer.

 

On one of our holidays to Lloret, I can’t remember which, instead of a table to ourselves we were sat with a middle-aged woman on her own named Beryl. At first we got on OK with her, though she was a bit weird. She kept inviting us up to her room for ‘parties’ when we knew perfectly well there would be no-one else present. We always declined these invitations for drinks on her balcony and goodness knows what else in her bedroom afterwards.

 

It transpired she had been separated or divorced from her husband for many years, and this trip was not merely a holiday but also an attempt by Beryl to track down her husband, possibly in an attempt to get hold of some of his money. One day she told us over the evening meal that she had spent the day in a town between Lloret and Barcelona where her husband was last heard of, and had spent an hour or so in the local cemetery studying all the inscriptions to see if her husband’s name was there. She didn’t seem to know if he was dead or alive.

 

She told us about the stray cats, which we had also seen along the cliffs by the sea. Beryl didn’t fool us when she always wrapped up in a napkin all the food she couldn’t eat ‘for the stray cats’. We knew it was to eat later on her balcony as she drank her bevy and enjoyed the view. Apparently she had a very good view, at the back of the hotel overlooking the swimming pool. Her balcony also overlooked other bedrooms at right-angles to hers in another wing of the hotel. She told us one morning she saw a man come out on his balcony with nothing on. George asked her if she recognized him in the dining room, but Beryl said when he came out on his balcony starkers she wasn’t looking at his face. She also said the bedroom curtains were so thin they were like nets, and you could see right through them into people’s rooms when the lights were on inside. This gave me a complex I still have to this day, and at one time I put up two sets of curtains in my bedroom in case neighbors can see in, not that there is often much to see since I only share my bed with my pet cat, Tibby, nowadays.

 

One day we were chatting over our evening meal and Beryl mentioned that her son was in the army and had been involved in the Falklands campaign. This really got our backs up as we were unsympathetic to the army (except that soldiers in uniform are erotic sex objects to most gay men, us included) and we were totally opposed to the Malvinas episode. We firmly believed the Malvinas (Falklands) rightly belonged to Argentina, and that the British settlers there should either take Argentinian citizenship or come home to Britain if they insisted on being British.

 

Inevitably the discussion got more and more heated, and in the end as she kept on about her son’s Falklands experiences George burst out:

 

‘Well, he’s a murderer then’.

 

At this point Beryl stood up and started shouting hysterically, demanding to be moved to another table. She had clearly been drinking in the afternoon, and so probably had George. It was quite embarrassing, as other diners could have gotten quite the wrong impression when a woman sitting with two men suddenly started demanding a table on her own and shouting that she would never sit with us again. It obviously looked as if we had made an improper suggestion when in fact, if anything, it was the other way around (she constantly inviting us to her room, presumably with hanky panky in mind).

 

The waitress and head waiter came over, and eventually they got her a table on her own for the evening meal. The waitress gave us a knowing look - she knew Beryl was eccentric and that it wasn’t entirely our fault.

 

Next day we went down to the dining room for the evening meal, and as we waited for the doors to open we studied the menu for the day. Beryl came up to us as if nothing had happened the previous evening and started chatting away merrily about the menu and what she had done that day. From then on we sat at the same table together with no further incidents, though all talk of the Falklands and her son in the army was studiously avoided.

 

When we all left at the end of our holiday, Beryl made a big thing about how nice the waitress had been and how she was going to give her a big tip. In the event she gave her just a few pesetas. She was OK though, and gave us a few laughs on our holiday.

 

Now whether all this happened on this particular holiday I can’t remember. Certainly we fed the stray cats on this visit, as I have photos to prove it. It became a yearly ritual, going up the cliffs to a slightly wooded area (where a little bit of gay and straight hanky panky also went on, but we didn’t participate) to feed the hundreds of stray cats, many of them kittens. We bought milk and cat food from the supermarket, and fed them every day. When we fed them for the last time on the evening before we left for home, a black and white cat followed us all along the path mewing frantically, as if it was begging us to take it home with us. If it hadn’t been for quarantine regulations I think we might have done so. As it was we were both in tears as we walked back to the hotel, George telling me not to look back as we couldn’t do anything about it. It broke our hearts because we knew the poor thing could be dead when we came back next year - many cats do not survive the winter. They get plenty of food from tourists in the summer, but have to fend for themselves in the cold winter months.

 

We did the usual things whilst in Lloret, spending a lot of time on the beach. We watched some Catalan dancing in the main square one or two evenings, which we enjoyed very much. We may even have joined in on one occasion. I remember we showed Rose the dancing the previous year, but he was not as taken with it as we were.

 

We visited Tossa-de-Mar as usual, but we may have given Barcelona a miss this time. At least I have no photos of it in my album, and George doesn’t mention a visit in his diary. Instead we visited the town of Gerona, which was quite interesting. We flew into Gerona airport each year, but had never seen the town itself. It was set on a river, and there were steep, narrow streets leading up to the cathedral, from where there were fine views of the town and surrounding hills. There was also some quite interesting Catalonian architecture, although it was not exactly Gaudi.

 

We also paid a visit to Figueras, home of the Dali Museum. Wednesday September 20th, 1989 sticks in my memory as one of the happiest days of my life. I remember saying to George afterwards that if at the end of my life someone told me I could have one day to re-live over again, this would be it. Gay couples don’t usually have a wedding day to remember, so that can’t be the happiest day of our lives, and the day we met was quite uneventful until the last few hours when I met George in a cinema. However that Wednesday towards the end of our time on Earth together was the most perfect day I can remember, spent entirely with the person I loved most, my George.

 

It was a difficult journey to Figueras. We had to get up early and catch a local bus to Blanes Station. We then had to change trains en route, at Gerona I think. We finally arrived, and left the station without a clue where the Dali museum was. Fortunately there were some town maps and signs directing us to the museum. As we walked down the main boulevard we came across a self service restaurant, where we each had a truly marvelous meal. Our day of perfection had begun.

 

The sun was shining in a clear blue sky as we made our way from the restaurant, and eventually there facing us was one of the most fantastic, surrealist sights on Earth - rivaling even Gaudi’s art-nouveau excesses in Barcelona. A large red castle-like edifice with a circular turret was ahead of us. The entire building was covered in symmetrical ornamentation, giving it the appearance from a distance of being enclosed in red metal fixed in place with rivets. The most surrealist feature, however, was at the top of the walls and the tower where, in place of battlements, there were giant eggs, most upright, but some on the tower laying horizontal. In between these giant eggs atop the walls were triangular plinths surmounted by elegant silver statues. The whole thing was immensely pleasing to the eye, and of course utterly surrealist. This was, I believe, the castle where Dali’s wife, Gala, lived in her final years.

 

Next to it was the ‘Theater Museum’ exhibiting many of Dali’s works. In the pedestrian square outside the museum there were Dali sculptures, such as a statue atop a tall plinth of what looked like automobile tires, and halfway up some steps leading down to a street, a Dali statue of a human figure which was utterly surrealist. Immediately in front of the main entrance was a statue enclosed in iron railings for protection, which depicted a figure holding its hand to its head. However, in place of a head was a golden egg tilted on one side. Beneath the egg, at its narrower end, was an Elizabethan-style ruff. Next to this statue on a thin pole was a cluster of golden eggs.

 

The interior of the museum was a wonderland for Dali enthusiasts and surrealists. There were paintings and sculptures by the artist, and the room I’ve already mentioned where, from a wooden platform alongside one wall, you could look through a viewfinder and see Mae West’s face composed of two pictures on the wall for eyes, a mantelpiece nose, and Dali’s Mae West lips sofa.

 

In an internal courtyard was an old car complete with sculptured occupants. As you peered through the windows water started spurting up inside the car, as it was not just one of Dali’s surrealist sculptures but also a fountain, which switched itself on and off to surprise the unwary onlooker.

 

We bought loads of postcards of the museum and its exhibits, as photos were not allowed inside. Making our way back to the station I noticed one other surrealist piece of street furniture in the main boulevard. It was a tall column with blue sky and clouds painted on the outside. There was a vertical zip, partly undone to reveal a dark blue interior. This was obviously another of Dali’s sculptures in the town where he spent much of his life.

 

We had hoped to visit the village of Cadaques by the sea where the artist lived, but we didn’t have time to make this difficult journey. Dali had already died by the time we visited Figueras, but was buried at the time, I believe, in a fairly ordinary grave. I read later that his remains were moved for a time at least to the museum in Figureras where they became the main surrealist, if rather macabre, attraction.

 

We journeyed back on the train, and in the evening paid a visit to the bar we called (incorrectly) the ‘Cafe Berlin’ where there was cabaret and music. It was a perfect end to a perfect day as we danced happily to the music till the early hours. Without doubt, if I had one day to live over again, it would be that wonderful Wednesday, one of the many happy days I shared with my beloved George.

 

Two days later we returned to the UK after our twelve day holiday. There was only to be one more return visit to Lloret together, and we were, unknown to us, about to begin our last two years on Earth as a couple.

 

In October we met up with various friends, and we were invited to a Christmas lunch in early December at the Australian firm where we both used to work. We went to at least one special lunch or dinner after we had both left, and also to a party held in the company’s luxurious flat in Holland Park.

 

Amnesty International had its usual Christmas Party and panto, in which members of the staff dressed up and did a lot of ‘in jokes’. I took part for the first time that year, dragged up as a witch in a version of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. My original script was rejected, and I had to threaten to walk out of the production in order to get some of my lines reinstated.

 

My character was a disguised version of Lady Snobbo, the aristocrat with the cut-glass accent who was the butt of so many sketches George and I did together at parties and on video. George helped me write my lines for the script, but he didn’t come along as he did not really want to mix with ex-colleagues. He’d left saying he was concentrating on a freelance career as a writer, and I think he feared being questioned about his degree of success in this field. He certainly did have some success, but often for raunchy stories for the gay press which he wrote under a pseudonym. Also there was bad feeling because of the blacklisting of his name for the whistle-blowing letter he had published in ‘The Guardian’.

 

Sometimes I felt I had somehow betrayed him by getting a job at Amnesty International after he left, and for staying on there after discovering George had been blacklisted. I know George felt anyone with a conscience could not carry on working in an organization unless they spoke out about its deficiencies. However, it was I who had first answered the advert which eventually got George and myself jobs there, and I felt I had every right to the job. The hours suited me, and with telex becoming obsolete and myself being over 40 I knew I would have great difficulty getting a job elsewhere. Besides, I am of the firm opinion that if all the good apples leave the barrel only the rotten ones will be left, which can’t be good for any organization. It was George’s decision to leave, and I think there was more to it than frustration at deficiencies in the organization - he sought a new direction to his career and didn’t want to remain a telex operator for the rest of his life. Besides, any charity/organization one works for is likely to have similar deficiencies.

 

We had a rather embarrassing visit to the theater in mid December to see the musical ‘Return to the Forbidden Planet’. It was a very gimmicky production, with people dressed in outlandish spacesuits welcoming  people ‘aboard the spaceship’ as you entered the theater. This put George off for a start, and the show consisted of what he regarded as sheer plagiarism - a re-hash of old rock’n’roll hits. Of course this has been done successfully many times, but on this occasion George took great exception to it, and we walked out halfway through with George shouting out ‘rubbish’ and similar criticisms towards the stage and space-suited theater staff as we exited, with people turning round to see who was disrupting the show. I can’t honestly remember if the show was that bad, or if George had simply not been in the mood and had perhaps had a few drinks before we went to the show, but drink or no drink he was not averse to saying exactly what he thought, and this show very much upset him.

 

On Christmas Eve we set off by coach from an hotel near Euston to spend Christmas in the Rhineland. The coach departed from the hotel car park, we did not stay there overnight. Unknown to us, it was to be the very last Christmas we ever spent together.

 

On the coach there was a rather elderly gentleman who went on this trip every year to spend Christmas in Andernach, a little town on the Rhine. During the journey he told us all about it. George and I were booked to go on another Christmas trip (to Paris this time) the year he died, and my mother went with me instead. We saw this old man in the other coach on his way to Andernach yet again.

 

It was a pleasant Christmas break. Even in a little town like Andernach all the transport was running on Christmas day. It was only in UK that families without cars were prevented from seeing each other or going anywhere, and those with cars were forbidden to drink over Christmas because of selfish transport workers. As far as George and I were concerned, the sooner we were ruled from Brussels, sweeping away all our silly British restrictions, the better. We were true Europeans, and felt nearly everything was done so much better on the Continent, or indeed in the USA and Australia, than it is in the UK.

 

We stayed in a family run hotel, and the meals were quite adequate, though as we expected, not the traditional British Christmas fare. No doubt some British tourists were complaining about missing their turkey and Christmas pud, but they should have stayed at home.

 

Christmas day was bright and sunny, and we walked around the town without overcoats, looking at the castle and the River Rhine. During our three night stay we were taken by coach to nearby Koblenz, where we viewed the river Rhine again and the rather grim gray monuments on its banks, and we also had a brief look at the shops and outside of the cathedral. We went on a pleasant river trip on the Rhine, and the Lorelei Rock was pointed out to us.

 

We found Andernach a little quiet, but we enjoyed the break. The only thing that spoiled it for me was the news that the Ceausescus had been shot on Christmas day. Although never an admirer of his regime, I felt this did not augur well for democracy in the post-Communist world, and there seemed something particularly horrifying and callous in this cold-blooded execution without a fair open trial, on Christmas day. I had a terrible feeling of depression and foreboding, which proved unfortunately to be justified in my personal life as well as in the former Communist countries. Within two years George would be dead, and the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union would be breaking up into warring tribes of sadistic barbarians. The joy of the Berlin Wall coming down earlier that year had been short-lived. Those two shots in Romania on Christmas day 1989 may have ended the Cold War, but they also heralded a new hot one in many ex-Communist countries.

 

We traveled back home on December 27th, knowing in just over two weeks we were off again on our journey of a lifetime, to Australia no less.

We went down to Hastings on New Year’s Eve. If we couldn’t be with them over Christmas, we always tried to go for New Year, as Neil got quite upset if we didn’t admire their Christmas decorations and the huge Christmas tree they always had.

 

1990 was to be our last full calendar year together, though of course neither of us knew it. George worked for just one week of it, and on Friday January 5th he did his last regular paid day’s work of his life. The American company for which he worked refused to give him three weeks off to visit Australia. They told him, in effect, if he couldn’t see Australia in two weeks he’d have to leave. Apparently this is standard practice in the United States, which explains why there are so many package tours for Americans to see Europe in less than a fortnight. Presumably they never get the chance to go further afield, unless they are so rich they don’t have to work, or can fit holidays in between changing jobs.

 

Of course George could have reapplied for his job a decent interval after we’d returned from Australia. There was no need for him to never work again, as several people had left the company and gone back. But George never tried to return. The hours were very difficult, and I think he felt he’d had enough, since he still hadn’t embarked on the new career he sought when he left Amnesty International.

 

Jimmy, a friend of George’s who lived in Aldershot, came to collect our cat. He was to look after Trixie while we were away. Apparently he had a tramway track in his flat, with large model trams, and Trixie was quite fascinated by them, if a little scared of the noise they made.

 

On Thursday January 11th we set off for the big adventure. The fact that George was so determined to go to Australia makes me now feel sure that even when we booked back in 1989 he felt he didn’t have long to live and might never make it if he didn’t go now. True fares were coming down and we got quite a good deal, but arguably it would have been even cheaper in a few more years. I remember when I suggested this George was adamant that we didn’t put it off, and he was right. It was truly the holiday of a lifetime, and for some reason it is now the most traumatic of all the holidays we went on for me to recall. There were later holidays, and of course the last one we took together in Jersey where he was so ill, which is also very traumatic for me to remember, but none whose happy memories cause so much pain as the Australian trip. Whenever I think about this holiday it is almost as if that is where George is now, and for that reason I doubt I will ever visit Australia again, since it would be such a disappointment not finding him there. George was planning another visit when he died, but I know I’d just be looking for him everywhere if I went again, and I’d rather keep the memories of us there together on the other side of the world.

 

For this long-haul flight we were flying, believe it or not, from Luton airport on Britannia, the charter airline. We set off in plenty of time, as we thought, only to get to St Pancras station and find there was no train to Luton for one and a half hours. We should, of course, have gone from Kings Cross Thameslink station down the road, but the St Pancras booking office failed to tell us this. As we sat in the empty train for over an hour I saw a friend of mine on the platform and had a brief chat (the guy who’d got me the job at CND headquarters all those years ago). For some reason I didn’t tell him we were off to Australia. It seemed ridiculous to be sitting in a train to Bedfordshire which didn’t leave for another hour or so, when one was off to the other side of the world. Heathrow and Gatwick sound fine, but Luton airport? That’s where you go for Spain and other short-haul trips to the Continent.

 

Luton is one of the most difficult airports to get to in the London area, and had we known of the terrible mainline train service from St Pancras we could have gone direct by Greenline bus, or of course the Thameslink service which we weren’t really aware of. Instead we arrived at Luton station very late and had to have a taxi from there to the airport, where we found nearly everyone else had arrived and checked in ahead of us. No-one else seemed to have come by train from St Pancras, since we arrived alone at Luton station, but presumably other train passengers knew Thameslink had recently replaced most of the St Pancras to Luton services.

 

It was a disaster for us, as all we could get were smoking seats. With George’s throat condition this was a terrible blow. It was also most unfair, since we had booked the holiday months ago, probably before many of the people who were allocated no smoking seats. We had to sit in a smoke filled cabin for well over twenty hours, and George’s throat never recovered. In a way it spoilt the whole holiday for us, since he could hardly eat anything most of the time. For long haul journeys such as this no-one should be forced to sit in a smoking compartment against their will. Smoking on aircraft should be banned altogether rather than risk someone’s health in this way. (Of course, years after George died smoking was banned altogether in most aircraft.)

 

The seats were also very cramped for such a long flight. It was very early days for charter flights to Australia, and they seemed to be using the same planes they used for Spain and other Mediterranean destinations. However, we did have movies and audio entertainment on board.

 

It was a very long flight indeed, about 27 hours all told with fuel stops in Bahrain and Singapore, where we got out and stretched our legs. Both were new experiences for us, and our first glimpse of Asia. We saw Saudi Arabia and India far below from the plane windows - it was hard to believe we were so far away from home, even though we’d previously been halfway around the world the other way as far as Hawaii. Asia seems so much more foreign, exotic and distant than the United States.

 

In Singapore a lot of people broke their journey for a few days, so we were able to get seats in the non-smoking compartment for the last few hours. We flew into Cairns airport in Queensland to go through immigration procedures. This was because we were flying to Canberra, which had no international airport. Once through immigration we took off again and headed south. We crossed the Great Barrier Reef, and could see the beautiful colors in the blue sea below the plane.

 

We finally arrived at the unimpressive Canberra airport, and walked through the arrivals lounge to the entrance. Our immediate impression of Australia’s capital city of some 200,000 people was ‘where is it?’ Even as we drove by taxi through the city streets to our hotel little could be seen but trees, hedges and distant hills. It made Welwyn Garden City look like a pulsating metropolis.

 

It turned out we were staying in the diplomatic quarter, which was very suburban in character, as is all but the very center of Canberra. In fact, we were only a short distance from Parliament and the center of town. We had a chalet type apartment with a back view of the modern architecture of a Serbian church next door to the motel. Nearby was a Burns Center where ex-patriot Scots celebrated Burns night whilst we were in Canberra, but George didn’t feel inclined to go along.

 

During our whole stay in Australia, traveling by bus between Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney, we never saw any kangaroos or other animals unique to the continent, except in Sydney Zoo. However, as soon as we arrived we were fascinated by the many strange birds we saw and heard. The familiar sparrows and pigeons seemed somehow out of place amongst the more exotic varieties.

 

Also different were the stars, few of which you can see in London anyway. The Southern Cross was a constellation we had never seen before, which emphasized how far away from home we were. Yet I had the strangest feeling, wherever we were in Australia, that our little flat in Battersea might be right beneath our feet on the other side of the globe.

 

We were staying in an avenue shaped like a huge crescent, and when we discovered the Prime Minister’s residence was further along the road we decided one day to take a stroll along there. About two miles later we finally arrived at a rather unimpressive residence, screened by high walls with security cameras on the gates. It did not seem worth the long walk there and back again.

 

Although Australia’s new Parliament Building was fairly close, it was impossible to see till you were right on top of it. Literally, as it happens, since it is buried beneath a green mound. To be precise, the roof has been turfed over to form a lawn, and it slopes right down to ground level on one side, so to all appearances you are walking up a pleasant green hill to a large, steel-sculptured flagpole by a stepped wall. When you arrive at the top of this ‘hill’ you find the flagpole and wall are on the roof of the Parliament Building, the main facade of which is now below you. On the ‘hill’ are various areas where you can look down into the building and its courtyards.

 

It is a very cleverly designed building, and we were taken inside to see the Chambers. It is strange that we have seen the parliamentary chambers of both the United States and Australia, but not the House of Commons or the House of Lords at home in London. None of the Chambers we visited were sitting when we were there.

 

We found the Australian parliament building a very impressive piece of modern architecture, but most impressive of all was the huge meal we got in the self-service cafeteria. This was before George’s throat started playing up, and we really enjoyed the meal in the restaurant with a terrace looking out over Canberra under the clear blue sky.

 

From the new Parliament Building there was a view of the old Parliament Building by the river, and the mountains beyond. We spent some time in the new building, and sent some postcards with the special parliamentary postmark. I wrote one to work, and George encouraged me to give the impression I might decide to stay in Australia, we liked it so much. So after ‘See you in three weeks’ I put a question mark.

 

As we left the building and started walking into downtown Canberra, we saw numerous stray cats hiding in the hedges. The scenery was still very green, with trees, lawns and hedges everywhere and little sign of any buildings, which were all well hidden, though not half underground like Parliament. As we crossed the bridge over the artificial river or lake, we saw the urban center of Canberra, with its shops, offices and the all-important bus station where in a few days we had to catch a bus to Melbourne.

 

We explored the downtown area, which had some pedestrianized shopping streets with some impressive fountains. There were also more unexpected things, like a carousel. We discovered the bus station was quite a good place to get a nice snack, and I also spent some time trying to trace an acquaintance from work who was in Canberra at the time. I found the local Amnesty International office, but they had never heard of the person. I left a message for her, but found out when I got home that she had indeed been in Canberra, but was having a baby and was in any case not in Australia to work for Amnesty International so was not known by the local office.

 

We had two days in Canberra, and spent some time in the park area adjoining the lake. We visited the island, accessible by a bridge, and viewed the huge water jet fountain springing from the middle of the lake. There was also an interesting bell-tower on the island. On the banks of the lake I visited an old schoolhouse, said to be the oldest building in Canberra, whilst George waited for me outside. We enjoyed our visit to this very quiet capital city, but even after seeing the downtown area it was hard to believe nearly a quarter of a million people lived there. The suburbs must surely spread unobtrusively for miles to accommodate them all.

 

As pre-arranged by our travel agent back home, we caught the coach from the bus station and were soon leaving the Australian Capital Territory and traveling south through New South Wales on our way to Melbourne. On the way we passed a sign pointing to Wagga Wagga, and knew we really were in Australia, despite the apparent absence of kangaroos (although their presence in the vicinity was acknowledged by the large number of road signs warning drivers to beware of these elusive animals crossing the highway.) The scenery was fairly green, with trees and the odd lake, and often mountains in the distance. Most of the land seemed to be uncultivated, as on our travels in the United States. Of course, we never got into the heartland of Australia or saw the real Outback. It didn’t really appeal to us, traveling through miles of desert just to see Ayers Rock or Alice Springs. Being urban creatures, the big Australian cities were of far more interest than some rock mountain in the desert.

 

We crossed into Victoria state after passing through the town of Albury, where the coach stopped for 30 minutes or so, and finally we arrived in Melbourne and took a taxi to our hotel.

 

Melbourne was very different from Canberra: a metropolis of skyscrapers very like the North American cities we had visited, except that here trams were lined up everywhere (and even these brought echoes of San Francisco’s cable cars and New Orleans’ streetcars). We had arrived in the middle of the Great Melbourne Tram Strike, and these vehicles had just been lined up in the middle of the busy streets and abandoned for the duration. Most were painted green and yellow, but a few came in other colors, like a blue and white tram with decorative windows advertising Australian Eagle Insurance. These parked vehicles proved quite an obstacle when trying to cross the roads, but at least if they weren’t moving they couldn’t knock you down.

 

There seemed to be some sort of festival on whilst we were there, and in one of the main shopping streets a teenage brass band was playing. We went into a department store and had a meal in their below ground self-service restaurant.

 

There was a colleague of mine from my workplace in every city we were visiting in Australia, and after missing Marianne in Canberra, I was keeping a lookout for Rob in Melbourne. I didn’t have an address for him, but I found myself watching all the customers in the self-service restaurant every time we ate there in case he walked in. He didn’t.

 

Walking along one street we suddenly came across the Princess Theatre where George’s favorite musical, ‘Les Miserables’, was playing. I had already seen it once, and George many times, but we went to the box office and to our utter amazement were able to get Grand Circle seats for that very night. In London you would have to book months ahead, but it was very fortunate for us since, after our arrival late the previous evening, we only had one more night in Melbourne.

 

We both enjoyed the production very much indeed, and George started talking to some of the theater staff and told them that the production was at least as good, if not better, than the London one, which seemed to please them.

 

Apart from the skyscrapers, there were some impressive civic buildings in Melbourne, and here we got our first look at typical Australian terraced town houses with their ornate balconies. There are quite a few of these in both Melbourne and Sydney, but apparently they were little valued and were starting to be demolished until someone slapped a preservation order on them. Quite rightly too, as they are as unique to Australia as the balconied houses of the French Quarter are to New Orleans.

 

On my insistence we ventured south across the river to get a view of the whole downtown area and skyline, and the thought entered my head that this was the furthest point south on the globe George and I would ever travel. We never went south far enough to see the coast, in the form of Port Philip Bay, for we only had one full day in the city, which was sufficient for all we wanted to see.

 

Melbourne has one of the highest Greek populations outside Greece or Cyprus, and as I saw all the Greek restaurants and other businesses I wondered if my godfather was sitting in one of them. Noona and Panos, my Greek godparents, had settled in Melbourne many years before, and Noona had since died. I should have asked my dad for Panos’ address, but I didn’t, and I couldn’t look him up in the phone book as I didn’t know his surname. Even ‘Noona’ and ‘Panos’ were dubious, as I believe at least ‘Noona’ was just a baby-word for ‘godmother’, so possibly neither were their real first names. I remembered them quite well, as they owned a restaurant just around the corner from my father’s in Swiss Cottage in the late 40s and early 50s.

 

Our departure from Melbourne was very upsetting. We were booked on a certain coach, and thinking we had plenty of time I said we might as well go by subway train, which should have gone direct from a station opposite our hotel to another one very near the bus station. First of all we got on one going in the wrong direction which wasn’t difficult to do since it was a sort of circle line. The only trouble was this particular train was terminating at the next station. We waited and waited on the platform for a train going back about two stations to the one we wanted, and in the end we had to give up and try and get a taxi. George was having trouble with his case on wheels as the handle kept coming off, and as we struggled across the road and tried to hail a taxi, we were both panicking. We finally caught a cab and got to the bus station just in time to catch our coach. The person on the check-in desk even remarked that we had left it till the very last minute, and George was absolutely furious with me. To save a few pennies I had caused him to have palpitations, and he made me promise in future we would have taxis whenever we were going to or from the coach station and our hotels.

 

On the long journey northeast to Sydney we made a couple of refreshment stops, and part of the way we had a movie to watch in the coach which turned out to be 'Clockwise’ starring John Cleese and Joan Hickson. It was a very funny film which we had seen before but enjoyed seeing again, whilst keeping one eye on the window for the odd wallaby or kangaroo, which alas never materialized.

 

Approaching Sydney, we seemed to go through endless suburbs for hours and hours. I was convinced Sydney must be about three times the size of London, but knew from the population of the entire country of Australia that this couldn’t be the case. Presumably the Sydney suburban houses and their gardens just take up a huge amount of land, after all there is plenty of it in Australia. At any rate, after first hitting the outer suburbs it took about two hours to arrive at the center of town. We were staying in the Kings Cross area, at the Kingsview Motel. To our delight, and contrary to what the name would lead you to expect, it was not a motel at all but an urban hotel in the main street, and our room windows and a nearby hotel roof terrace gave excellent views of downtown Sydney and also east towards Bondi Beach.

 

We had three weeks for our Australian trip, and we had divided it so that we spent three nights in Canberra, two in Melbourne, four in Singapore on the way home, one actually flying to Australia and the remaining ten in Sydney which was the place we really wanted to see, arriving back at Luton 20 days after we’d set out.

 

Another acquaintance of mine from the AI headquarters in London was working in Sydney at the time, and we actually did rendezvous with Marie on several occasions. She was working in the AI office there, and that is where I first met up with her. It was interesting to see the office and the machine where all the faxes I sent came out. George waited in a nearby pub whilst I was in the AI office, then I joined him for a very good and reasonably priced meal in the pub.

 

A day or so later I went over to Marie’s house and we had a chat at a typical Australian ‘barbie’ in her back garden along with other lodgers. George didn’t come on this occasion, but he met her later.

 

There was so much to see and do in Sydney. Apart from the tourist sights, there was a very large gay scene to explore, various beaches, and the Sydney Festival was on while we were there.

 

We met Marie downtown one day and had our photos taken around the harbor area with views of Sydney Harbor Bridge, the Opera House, etc.. We then went in a little restaurant by the harbor and George and Marie got on famously talking about Amnesty office in London and Marie’s boss, whom George knew from his days there. He was, to say the least, not popular with either of them.

 

The Circular Quay area of the main harbor, which is where all the tourist boats leave for various destinations, had many piers, and by one of them was a seafood stall. George loved seafood and went overboard for this kiosk. Nearly every time we passed it he bought himself a seafood takeway meal, which consisted of crab and various other shellfish and seafood. Once he’d discovered that kiosk it made the holiday for him. No matter how sore his mouth was, he could always manage a little seafood.

 

The Kings Cross area was quite lively, with plenty of fast food outlets and cafes. I ate there several times, but George being on amphetamines some of the time was not eating for days on end. In the backstreets in front of our hotel were lots of cheap lodgings for backpackers. You could walk via this route into town, going down some steep steps to a harbor area and into the park the other side. In this central park was a museum/art gallery, and if you walked right across the park you found yourself by the Sydney Opera House. We did this walk once or twice, but usually we got the subway, as Kings Cross station was right near our hotel.

 

In this park some open-air concerts were due to be held, but unfortunately it rained very heavily. We were actually quite lucky with the weather, as it had been a dreadful summer in Sydney, according to Marie, and we arrived during the one good spell in the entire summer, and had many hot, sunny days.

 

The first day in Sydney we took the circular tour bus which stopped in Kings Cross and went round all the main tourist sights. This started to give us our bearings.

 

Another day we visited the re-vamped Darling Harbor area, which we liked very much. It was a sort of tourist and recreation center, and amongst other things we visited the aquarium under the harbor with its glass walkways allowing you to view sharks and other fish. We also visited a Chinese garden with several pagoda-type buildings. We thought this would give us a foretaste of Singapore, but it was probably more authentically Chinese and Southeast Asian than anything we saw in Asia itself.

 

There were plenty of cafes and snack bars in Darling Harbor, many located in huge exhibition halls. We had arrived by Monorail, which runs in a loop through downtown Sydney, giving unique views as you glide along.

 

There were some little touches in Darling Harbor which really intrigued us: an unusual fountain consisting of a concentric circle set in the ground, with water gently flowing round it. I have a photo of George standing in it in his bare feet. Most of all, though, we fell in love with the unique white statues or figurines everywhere. These appeared to be made of some light material, and were of just ordinary people, no-one in particular. There were acrobats on stilts, and a little lady in a big hat with a handbag just standing on the pavement looking up towards the sky and smiling. We both had our photo taken by this charming figure. Then there was a statue of a man in open necked shirt and suit lounging on a real bench. I had my photo taken with my arm round his shoulder, and him looking towards me. Obviously these statues had been placed with photo opportunities in mind, and had they been painted they would have been indistinguishable from real people in the photos.

 

Of course we explored the downtown area itself, going up the inevitable Telecom tower, riding the Monorail and visiting the vast shopping malls which are all interconnected beneath street level. In one of these, by a subway station entrance, we found a little snack bar going by the charming name of ‘Eat’n’Run’. We ate here several times, and also in Woolworth’s cafeteria overlooking one of Sydney’s main streets. One thing which amused us was discovering Grace Brothers department store, which of course reminded us of the British sitcom ‘Are You Being Served?’ No doubt many British visitors go in hoping to discover Mrs Slocombe, Mr Humphreys and all the rest in the clothing department.

 

There were some unusual fountains in Sydney, one in a square right near our hotel in Kings Cross. This was a ‘dandelion’ type fountain of the sort we had first encountered in Dresden, East Germany. In one of the parks was a fountain with a statue on a plinth, and jets of water radiating from behind the figure. Other statues surrounded the central one in the pool around the main fountain.

 

I went for a walk in the streets behind our hotel one day and discovered a tranquil marina with adjoining parkland. Another day I took the subway to the Bondi area. I had to get a bus for the last bit of the journey, and frankly it was a bit of a disappointment when I finally arrived at Bondi beach. It was just a large, sandy bay with grassy banks leading down to it in the suburbs of Sydney. I don’t know quite what I expected, but something a bit more exciting than what looked like a very quiet, conservative British seaside resort. In fact it looked like a dead suburb attached to a quiet seaside resort. There were few shops, cafes or other amenities, and certainly nothing exotic such as palm trees. A functional all-purpose building on the beach served as a snack bar and had shower and toilet facilities, and that was about it.

 

I discovered swimming in Australia is a somewhat dangerous pastime. Apart from the worry about sharks, the main danger is from surfers who are likely to knock your head off with their surfboards. So swimming is restricted to one narrow area of most beaches, the rest is taken over by surfers. The waves were certainly very high, but I found the novelty soon wore off. It was hopeless for snorkeling, so I left my mask at home on subsequent trips to the coast. This was not the Great Barrier Reef.

 

There are two types of beaches around Sydney. The seaward beaches, like Bondi and Manly, which have huge surfers’ waves. Then there are the calm harbor beaches, which we did not have time to visit. The latter would be more suitable for snorkeling, but unfortunately they are also more suitable for sharks. All popular beaches have shark nets, but as Marie kindly pointed out to us, the huge holes clearly visible in all these nets testify as to how ineffective they really are. Still, very few people are actually attacked by sharks, and after your first swim you tend to forget about them. The surfers were a far more real hazard.

 

George didn’t come with me to Bondi, but on another occasion we took a boat from Sydney Harbor across to Manly beach, which was a much livelier resort than Bondi. It had two beaches, one at each side of a peninsular. There was the harbor beach where our boat docked, but we walked along a busy pedestrianized shopping street, very much like a busy British seaside resort apart from the palm trees, to the seaward beach. It was strange to be at the seaside on a boiling hot day and see many of the shops still decorated for Christmas.

 

The seaward beach at Manly was another sandy beach with huge waves. George lay on the sand whilst I swam, but he said the fine sand was getting in his throat and making it sore. Still, we enjoyed the day out, and found some excellent little home-made steak and kidney pies in the shops around the resort, which we tucked into with relish whilst sitting on a seat.

 

Another day we took a boat from Sydney Harbor across to the zoo. This is where we saw our only marsupials during our visit to Australia, and the kangaroo we saw was lying down fast asleep. Sydney Zoo is in a lovely setting overlooking the harbor, with views of the distant Opera House and Sydney Harbor Bridge.

 

In the Rocks area above the main harbor and immediately below the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the Sydney Festival was in full swing. There were more of the typically Australian terraced houses with their iron balconies, and along these streets were parked hundreds of vintage cars assembled for the festival. On some grassland was a stage where we sat and listened to various bands, and all around the area two drag queens, one on stilts, kept walking around chatting to all and sundry. From a little park on a hill above this area I got a good view and a photo of the Harbor Bridge, and the church in front of the main festival area with a red London double decker bus parked in front of it.

 

Also near this area were some covered piers beyond the Harbor Bridge which had stalls and kiosks on them and which we explored. One day we went on the train across the bridge, got out a couple of stations later and came back. On the far side of the bridge down below the station was a little fun fair, but we didn’t visit it and, indeed, it may have been closed. On a TV documentary I have seen since it appeared to be sadly derelict.

 

We explored the Sydney gay scene, for which George had saved up his ‘sweeties’ (amphetamines). We discovered a backroom-type club in Sydney’s Oxford Street, which we both visited several times. On one occasion I got talking with someone there and told him that there was nothing like that in London (which was true at the time). He laughed and said something to the effect that it didn’t surprise him since Britain lived in the Victorian age in many respects. Then I really felt Britain was the laughing stock of the entire civilized world with its antiquated morality laws.

 

This backroom club was extremely well run, with free coffee on offer in a sort of lounge area, cubicles if you wanted to be private, and of course free safe sex advice and condoms handed out to everyone as they entered.

 

U.S. porn star, Jeff Stryker, was performing in a park in Sydney during our stay, but we didn’t make the journey out to the suburbs to see him. Had we been a few weeks later we could have seen the gay Mardi Gras for which Sydney is now world famous.

 

We were there for Australia Day, which was our last full day in Australia. Flags were flying everywhere, and George described some of the special events in an article he wrote (see below).

 

We met Marie one evening and went into one of the lesser auditoriums in the Sydney Opera House to see Victor Spinetti reciting his ‘Very Private Diary’. It was basically a queen gossiping about famous people, and was very funny. Marie enjoyed it as much as we did.

 

Also whilst in Sydney we saw Daniel Day-Lewis prove himself to be an outstanding actor in the moving film ‘My Left Foot’ about overcoming severe physical disability.

 

On Marie’s advice, we took one trip right out of the Sydney metropolitan area altogether, inland to the Blue Mountains. We went by train to Katoomba, where we should have caught a bus outside the station to the gorge overlooking the mountains. Instead we started walking, and eventually found it, walking along a wooded path by the gorge till we arrived at the main tourist area. This had a scary cable car which I went on, but George felt it was just too frightening as it left you suspended by the cliff-face above a sheer drop. It gave you a magnificent view of the Katoomba Falls (a high but narrow waterfall), the Orphan Rock and also the Three Sisters, which are three rocks on one of the nearer mountains. The more distant mountains did indeed look blue.

 

Ironically, although George wouldn’t go on the cable car, he elected to join me on a less scary looking ride. As we sat in it we found ourselves lying almost flat on our backs before being strapped in, and we knew we had let ourselves in for something a bit more robust than a little scenic train ride. We suddenly found ourselves catapulted through a tunnel and over the sheer cliff face at a 90 degree angle. In other words, from being flat on our backs we were standing vertically going down the gorge as if in a very narrow, open fronted elevator. It was extremely frightening, but we both survived to tell the tale.

 

We really enjoyed our stay in Australia, and Sydney especially, and planned to come back some day. Sadly, it was not to be.

 

Later, back in London, George wrote the following (unpublished) article about Sydney and its festival.

 

‘The highlight of our holiday was the unexpected surprise of discovering that the Festival of Sydney, which takes place through January, coincided with our stay there. It gave additional atmosphere and ambience to that most adventurous of Australian cities.

 

‘The Festival was launched on New Year’s Eve at Sydney harbour with a skyshow of fireworks, choreographed with a soundtrack of classical and rock music, all outdoors and all free. Indeed there are free shows and events daily, including street theatre at Darling Harbour and Circular Quay, outdoor movies outside the Opera House, lunchtime and twilight pop concerts, etc.. During January 1990 among the free events was a mid-Summer jazz concert at the Domain, a performance of “La Boheme”, symphonic concerts in Hyde Park, a “motorfest” of vintage cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses at The Rocks, and to celebrate Australia Day on 26 January, a ferrython at Sydney Harbour, with yacht races, a display of boats of all shapes and sizes, culminating in a fireworks display in the evening. And of course there is opera, theatre and all sorts of cultural and artistic activities taking place throughout the city during January. Just absorbing yourself in the atmosphere and ambience of Sydney during these exciting events and activities is sufficient reason for taking the trip down under.

 

Apart from the Festival, there are the historical associations, the shops (department stores open Sundays), various aspects of the city, from the red light district of Kings Cross, which is well worth a visit and not at all hazardous to wander around, and from the central railway station you can take a trip to view the Blue Mountains, if you wish to escape from the city and see some panoramic scenery. Take a ferry to the Island of Manly for one of the most pleasant beaches and seaside resorts where swimming, shopping and eating are among the leisure activities to experience. The restaurants in Sydney are a gourmet’s delight and not at all expensive. There is so much to do and see in Sydney that you will never be bored, especially during the Festival and on Australia Day. If you still feel like celebrating en route to UK why not stop over in Singapore for the Chinese New Year?’

 

From Sydney we caught the bus back to Canberra, and then hung around till it was time to get the taxi to the airport. We had a snack in the bus station while we waited. Then it was ‘goodbye’ to Australia as we left on our way to Singapore. On the plane they were showing the film ‘When Harry Met Sally’ which George enjoyed more than I did. It was dark by the time we arrived at Singapore for our one and only real taste of Asia.

 

We had three full days in Singapore, part of the package offered by the travel agency chartering the flights. Transport was waiting for us at the airport to whisk us to a very opulent hotel by our standards. It had a very large central lobby area which reached right to the roof, with plants and fountains playing.

 

All the landings looked down over this sort of internal courtyard. Our room was on the ground floor, and the window and balcony overlooked a typical South Asian building next door. Made primarily of wood with a large covered verandah, it stood off the ground on little stilts.

 

We soon discovered that the architecture in Singapore left a lot to be desired, and virtually none of it was what Westerners imagine as typically Chinese or Southeast Asian. Singapore was a modern Asian city with lots of soaring new skyscrapers, and the only concession to the local traditions was one octagonal modern office tower block which had a rather incongruous pagoda roof on top.

 

The older buildings which were left were more British Colonial than genuine Asian, and would have looked quite in place in any British city or, indeed, anywhere in Europe. Most of these were in Chinatown, the shrinking part of old Singapore on which the skyscrapers are fast encroaching. This was very like the Chinatowns in any Western city, the only local variation to the terraced houses with shops beneath being that the upper stories formed a covered arcade for the sidewalks beneath. This was also true of the Indian quarter which we visited briefly, but here the covered sidewalks were blocked by merchandise such as colorful saris, making it almost impossible to walk. This jumble and the spicy curry smells did not appeal to George, so we left the area quickly.

 

Chinatown was more interesting, and nearby we found perhaps the only typically Asian building of our entire stay in Singapore. It was a Hindu temple, with extremely ornate carvings inside and out, all very brightly painted. From the street the temple was amazing, with a very impressive gateway surmounted by a sort of elongated pyramid of statues on six different levels. We were pleasantly surprised that we were allowed into the temple grounds and even into the temple itself. There were various buildings, with ornate domes and colored statues on their roofs. In one little domed building we could see the enormous carved and painted head of some deity staring at us through the open door. The head was so large it covered one wall of the building and most of the space inside. In the main building were more painted statues, and a colorful painted ceiling. Like a mosque, there were just mats on the floor and no seats. This building was the most exciting we had seen on this trip, and made us feel we were really in Asia, even though it was on the very edge of the old Chinatown and was therefore surrounded by modern tower blocks on at least two sides.

 

Nearby we came to a shopping precinct, and there I bought a new shoulder bag. My old ‘Jetsave’ one which I’d gotten free from the airline on one of our American trips had finally given up the ghost and ended up in a wastepaper bin in our Singapore hotel.

 

Eating was a big problem for George in Singapore. Apart from not liking any Asian food, anything spicy or with onions, garlic or curry, his mouth was very sore again and full of ulcers. It seemed it had been bad since we were lying on that sandy beach in Manly. I ate one meal in a restaurant whilst George just sat at the table with a drink. A friend had told us of a posh hotel where you could get a very good and reasonable breakfast once a week, and on my insistence we went along on the special day, but no way would George go in. True, we felt uncomfortable in posh hotels and restaurants, but with his mouth being so sore he just couldn’t have ate anything anyway. Once I had breakfast in our rather up market hotel, and it was bloody awful. All the food seemed to be half cold and overcooked. From then on we relied mainly on McDonalds, and even then George would only have a drink. The only thing I remember him eating during our three days in Singapore was a portion of cooked chicken we got from a stall on Sentosa Island, which we ate sitting on a nearby bench.

 

We went to have a look at the famous Raffles Hotel, but it was all boarded up because it was being rebuilt, so we had to make do with the ultra-modern Raffles Shopping Mall opposite, which wasn’t quite the same thing. We were in Singapore for Chinese New Year, which meant there were extra decorations everywhere for the incoming year of the horse. We saw on the river by the market place lots of little boats colorfully decorated for the New Year celebrations. We strolled through this market, and I bought a couple of t-shirts. On one side of the river were some imposing colonial buildings and a statue of Raffles, and on the other side by the market was a row of old terraced buildings almost being pushed into the river by the huge skyscraper blocks behind.

 

If we wanted to see typical Chinese architecture we should have visited the Chinese Garden set in a park on the outskirts of the city, but we didn’t see much point if it was all artificial anyway. We’d already seen such a garden in Sydney’s Darling Harbor.

 

Instead we visited Sentosa Island. This was a little paradise George had discovered for me. I say for me, as he was anxious I should get some more swimming in before we arrived home and back to Winter, and there seemed to be very few beaches in Singapore, which is a busy port for shipping.

 

Always when we went abroad George would obtain books about the places we were visiting from the local library before we left, and by reading these he had discovered the existence of this little island used by the Japanese during the Second World War as a P.O.W. camp. It was now something of a tourist recreation area, and was reached by a very high cable car from the main Singapore island. For some reason George had no qualms about going on this cable car, even though it must have been about 200 feet above the street, buildings and sea below. On disembarking we each got a little souvenir gift, mine being a plastic fan long since lost and George’s a matchbox-like little house, which I still have on our bedroom shelf.

 

On the island was a large building containing lots of fast food outlets, and near here we got the chicken which was George’s only proper meal of our entire stay. From the main building was a walkway lined with trees, which had various fountains playing. Circling the island was a monorail, and we had a ride on this. At one corner of the island monorail circuit was a rather tacky reproduction of a Second World War scene complete with gunshot sound effects and models of British and Japanese soldiers supposedly engaged in a shootout.

 

At the far side of the island we disembarked from the monorail, by a very tropical-looking lagoon surrounded by palm trees, with a fantastic curving beach of almost pure white sand. It was one of the most beautiful spots I have ever seen, and not too crowded. Just beyond a wall and walkway was the open sea, but this lagoon was separated from it to form a little salt water lake with no waves (or sharks), perfect for swimming. We spent a very pleasant, hot afternoon by this lagoon, I got in plenty of swimming and even George had a paddle - something he couldn’t do on the Australian surfer beaches with their huge waves.

 

Apart from Sentosa Island and the Hindu temple, we weren’t all that impressed with Singapore, but the subway system was another exception. It was ultra-modern, with the platforms completely sealed off from the lines by partitions, a design now adopted for the London Jubilee Line extension. The train doors lined up exactly with sliding doors in these partitions so you, in effect, stepped from an underground room into the train. This prevented people falling or jumping off the platforms, and presumably kept the whole system very clean. Stations were announced by loudspeakers in each carriage, a practice also adopted by some London Tube lines. Not so clean were the streets around our hotel, where an all-pervading smell of raw sewage attacked one’s nostrils. This odor came from a ditch or stream alongside the road, which obviously served as an open sewer.

 

I toyed with the idea of crossing the bridge into Malaysia, and although there was a local bus which went via this bridge to a nearby town on the Malaysian mainland, I decided against it in the end. I thought there might be a lot of hassle with passports and Customs regulations, and I had visions of my being pulled off the bus for not having a visa or something, and being stranded on the bridge unable to get transport back. Had the subway gone there I would have risked it just to have a brief look at another Asian country.

 

It was with some relief we boarded the plane on the Wednesday for our final leg home. We got no smoking seats this time, and the film showing was ‘The Dead Poets’ Society’ which we both enjoyed. We made a fuel stop in Bahrain again, and then we were on our way to Luton airport and the long journey home from there.

 

Not having a job to go back to, George was anxious to at least get back to his voluntary work for Oxfam. He went for a formal interview in early March, and started the next day. This was at an Oxfam shop in Ealing which also specialized in second-hand records. He worked there several days a week for a long time, but eventually felt unable to go anymore in case the DHSS said he was making himself ‘unavailable for full-time paid work’ by doing voluntary work. During his time at the Ealing shop he felt rather unhappy that he was now working under a shop leader again, having been in charge of the Chelsea shop. However, George’s flair for this type of work came to the fore as he rearranged displays and pushed up sales.

 

I remember him telling me one story about a humorless couple who staffed the shop at weekends, and who wrote petty criticisms and comments in the staff book about the way the shop was run in the week. George wrote a strong reply, and signed it ‘Dockyard Doris’, which was the stage-name of a drag artist we both liked. The woman who wrote all the critical comments took it perfectly seriously, apparently not realizing that anyone who signed themselves in this manner was pulling her leg, and her critical reply began: ‘Dear Doris....’. I went with George one Saturday to take a look at this woman and her male assistant, neither of whom George had ever actually met. We both imagined a sour-faced middle-aged or elderly woman, but were surprised to find a young couple. One look at them, however, told us they had no sense of humor whatsoever.

 

Ealing studios were very close to the shop, and George pointed them out to me under the mistaken impression that ‘EastEnders’ was filmed there. In actual fact the famous Albert Square set is in Elstree. However, Gretchen Franklin, who played Ethel in the series, must have lived in the area as she sometimes came into the shop.

 

On my birthday George had to go for an interview with the Department of Employment in connexion with their so-called Skills Centre. It was a complete waste of time. Being in has late 40s with no university degree and in a line of work, telex, now obsolete, George had little chance of ever finding another decent job. The DHSS and Department of Employment offered no serious skill training to him whatsoever, but wanted George, and others like him, to just sit in a smoke-filled Job Centre all day reading newspaper adverts and applying for jobs. He already did this at home, and there was no way he could sit in a room with smokers due to his chronic throat condition. Ironically, if he had only known he was HIV positive he would have received all sorts of allowances and financial benefits.

 

Early on in his last bout of unemployment, possibly this interview, a totally incompetent person asked George what his line of work was, and he explained that it was telex but this was fast becoming obsolete.

 

‘Oh no,’ replied the interviewer confidently, ‘We have loads of telex jobs.’ She disappeared for a moment and then returned with a pile of positions for telesales, selling products over the phone. A more unsuitable job for George she couldn’t have chosen - he was shy on the phone, self-conscious about his soft voice (he wouldn’t even record a greeting on our answering machine because he didn’t like the sound of his own voice), and he was not the pushy salesman type, hating this kind of commercialism.

 

The interviewer was completely stumped when George told her that telex was nothing whatsoever to do with telesales, but when he explained it involved typing she clutched at the straw eagerly, nodding her head and saying:

 

‘Oh, you can type. We have many typing jobs.’

 

George sighed in exasperation, and tried once again to explain that he needed training since he couldn’t use a word processor or a typewriter, telex being a very specialized form of keyboard with only upper case characters and very limited punctuation. All this was lost on the stupid woman, who refused point blank to offer him any training.

 

The most annoying thing about it all was that George knew damn well he could do her own job much better that she could. He was no racist, but several times he applied for jobs at the Department of Employment and each time he had to fill in a form stating his ethnic background. He felt ticking the box marked ‘White’ deprived him of any chance of getting the job. He never even got an interview with the Department, yet Asians who didn’t know the difference between telex and telesales and cared even less, were telling him to find a job whilst denying him any training to enable him to do so.. It was enough to make anyone suicidal, and George was already in deep depression.

 

Even worse, George had always wanted to go to university, and was quite intelligent enough to get a degree. The logical thing at this stage in his life would have been to return to full-time education as a mature university student. However, this option is reserved for the upper and middle classes in full-time employment. Working class people who are unemployed are not welcome as mature students, so the option is never offered to them. Instead wealthy middle class people were at that time given grants to return to university for a year or two to study something totally useless to society, which would never get them a job and which they just felt like doing ‘to have a change from working’ or ‘as a hobby’. I know because I’ve talked to them, and they have told me that universities don’t want unemployed people as mature students. It is an absolute disgrace and the whole system is in need of a drastic overhaul.

 

George wanted more than anything to work in a library, as he already knew a lot about literature. Had he been helped to go university as a mature student he could have studied for a degree in Librarianship leading to a job in a library and ceased to be a burden on the State, but he received no help or encouragement whatsoever.

 

It was also annoying that free weekly magazines full of job vacancies were never distributed to Job Centres, but were handed out at train and tube stations in the rush hours to those already in full-time employment. Everything is geared against the unemployed, and the then Tory government’s only interest was in getting them off the official unemployment register. If they sat in a Job Centre looking at newspapers once a week applying for jobs under the eye of a government employee they were officially receiving ‘training’ and were therefore technically not unemployed. George refused to comply with this charade, and the authorities refused to give him any useful training whatsoever, yet he could have been a very useful member of society again with a university degree given a bit of official help and encouragement. How many others are there out there in a similar position?

 

Two days after this interview, we left London for a long weekend in Glasgow visiting George’s sisters and relations. I can’t remember many details of this particular trip, but I do know most of George’s nephews and nieces were also unemployed. Unlike George they seemed extremely well off though. One of his unemployed nephews came into George’s sister’s flat with a video tape he had just recorded at his home from satellite TV, then an expensive luxury.

 

As on many other visits to Glasgow, we were totally ignored by most of George’s nephews and nieces and their spouses, who walked in and out without saying ‘hallo’ or even nodding in our direction most of the time. No-one asked how we were getting on or attempted to chat to us. They all seemed totally preoccupied with their own families, screaming brats and social security fiddles. George’s sister, Betty, doted on all her grandchildren, but to us it was just heterosexual Hell, and we were not sorry to return to London.

 

Easter weekend we saw the Parade in Battersea Park on the Sunday, and popped into a jazz festival in the Barbican on the Bank Holiday Monday.

 

At this time George was investigating courses he could go on to try and train for something, since the Department of Employment were so unhelpful. He wrote down ‘Pitman College, Holborn’ in his diary, but this came to nothing. The fees for commercial courses would be beyond the means of an unemployed person anyway.

 

On the last weekend in April we went down to see Rose in Hastings. Later that week they came to fix our new entry-phone, which the council had installed in our flats. George was unhappy about this supposed security measure. At least without any entry-phone system you could see who was at your front door before opening it, through the peephole we had installed. With entry-phones, if it rang you couldn’t tell who it was. Once you answered they knew someone was in, and if you didn’t answer they might well decide you were out, wait till someone else opened the communal main door and then come and burgle your flat.

 

In actual fact the entry-phone system was a great improvement, but it took some getting used to. Of course, it could be awkward if someone called round you didn’t want to see, as you could not find out who it was till you had let them know you were in. However, this didn’t happen very often. (Unfortunately for George, due to his amphetamine problem, it was a frequent worry that someone he couldn’t cope with seeing when he was not high on speed would call around at the wrong time and ring the Entry Phone. The only solution was for me to answer, and pretend George was out, and for George to ignore all Entry Phone calls when he was on his own in the flat.)  A few days later new telephone codes were introduced for London, so it was all change for us that week.

 

Round about the end of May/beginning of June our little cat, Trixie, whom we had ‘rescued’ from my mother’s old place in Kilburn, started showing signs of a similar paralysis of the back legs which Dixie had suffered in 1986 shortly before he died. We took Trixie to the Blue Cross, where they said she was dehydrated and gave her massive fluid injections.

 

We hoped against hope that she would recover. We tried to feed her water with a mouth syringe the Blue Cross had given us, but we both wept as we knew it was hopeless. She had never been a well cat, and now it seemed to be all over. One day in June we admitted we would have to say goodbye to another cat.

 

On that fateful day we sat tearful in the waiting room whilst they administered the lethal injection in another room. A woman sitting with her own pet saw we were upset and started asking us about Trixie. She gave us some words of comfort by pointing out that, although we had only had her a short time, we had given her a good home for the last two years of her life. This boosted our spirits a little bit, but it was heartbreaking to lose another baby so soon. This is what our cats were to us, our babies, part of our family unit.

 

Later in June George had an appointment at St Thomas’s Hospital. He was getting increasingly deaf, and finally plucked up courage to get it investigated. During several visits to St Thomas’s, on which I accompanied him since he was terrified of hospitals, they syringed his ears and fitted him with a hearing aid. He very rarely wore it, but the syringing itself helped matters a great deal.

 

On Saturday June 30^th we went to Kennington Park for the Gay Pride Festival, and to see the march arrive. We always went to the Festival in the park, if only to see Lily Savage, the acid-tongued Liverpudlian drag queen who used to have a cabaret tent of her own. The events on the main stage rarely interested us, but we used to browse around the stalls and have a drink and perhaps a snack at the café in the park, steering well clear of the ‘pink pound’ merchants trying to rip us off at the food and drink stalls. (In those days Pride Festivals were free – we would NEVER have paid £25 or more to attend one.)

 

Ever year there seemed to be more and more screaming brats as supposedly gay women wheeled them around in pushchairs. George remarked on the irony of it all - how could they be real lesbians if they slept with men in order to have children? If they had them by artificial insemination it was just as bad. The world was already overpopulated, and there were millions of orphans in need of parents, so why go to such lengths to increase the population still further at the taxpayers' expense on the NHS? To us kids were totally alien to the gay lifestyle - monsters from Hell who were part and parcel of being cursed heterosexual.

 

We suspected many of these lesbians were either only pretending to be gay because they thought it trendy and politically correct, or more likely they were out to grab all they could from the State. A brat meant family allowance and probably a council flat, and they also considered it politically correct for all women, gay or not, married or single, to indulge their natural maternal feelings. However, to us, it just didn’t seem like Gay Pride anymore with all these sprogs accompanied by their mothers - it was all part of the family Hell we were trying to escape from.

 

We both had little time for strident feminists, such as Linda Bellos of Lambeth Council. Surely not her real name, George maintained, as ‘Bellos’ meant ‘War’. In July 1990, following publication of a Free Page by Wages Due Lesbians, we both had letters published in ‘Capital Gay’ under pseudonyms for fear of the Lesbian backlash. I reproduce them here:

 

‘Hi-jacking the Gay Movement

Dear Editor, I am grateful to “Capital Gay” for allowing “Wages Due Lesbians” a free page (July 6^th) in which to express their policies and activities, since by their own words, they have proved themselves to be a minority group of militant, feminist, anarchist agitators who have hijacked the gay movement to promote extremism, just as they infiltrated the peace movement in 1987 and created a state of civil war with moderate feminists and pacifists in the women’s peace camps.

 

Their activities even alienated them from Camden Council who stopped funding their centre after initially supporting it.

 

Why lesbians should set themselves up as a separate exploited minority who demand wages for housework, is irrational. What about “wages for hen-pecked husbands who do housework”? The only work WDL seem to do is create a continual state of conflict with everything and everyone around them.

 

They even protested to the Gay Pride Committee about the 30 pound charge for a stall in Kennington Park. They seem to forget that the suffragette movement grew in strength because they believed in independence for women. But WDL argue in reverse, since they want to be dependent on ratepayers and taxpayers for State subsidies, social security, lesbian centres, test-tube babies, council housing, even going so far as to expect the gay movement to pay for their stall at the Pride Carnival.

 

What they advocate is parasitical propaganda. They complain about the hostility of heterosexual society, yet create alienation by advocating anarchy. WDL claim to represent blacks, gays, prostitutes, pacifists, environmentalists, and women, but the majority in these movements do not identify or wish to associate with this tiny splinter group of mindless militants who do more harm than good to their causes. Yours sincerely, Peter Odera, Brixton, SW2.’ (George’s letter).

 

 

 

‘It’s All Just Tory Propaganda.

Dear Editor, I was rather concerned to see you give a free page to the presumably Tory propaganda group, “Wages Due Lesbians”. Of course, they may claim to be a genuine lesbian pressure group, but no-one could be expected to take seriously any organization with a name like that - it is obviously thought up by Tory propagandists to provoke the maximum anti-gay sentiment. Watch out for “Local Councils Owe Gay Men Wages For Doing Housework” as a future Tory ploy to blame gays for high poll tax bills.

 

Imagine the impact on the poorer sections of society like pensioners and hard-working low wage-earners on being arrogantly told that they owe lesbians money for “the additional physical and emotional housework of surviving in a hostile and prejudiced society”. What on Earth is “emotional housework”? If trying to play on heterosexual men’s guilt feelings for their treatment of women, “emotional blackmail” would be a more apt phrase. While married women should indeed have a legal right to claim wages from those exploiting husbands who get all their housework done for them for free, lesbians, single women and men are more fortunate in being able to claim unemployment benefit or income support when not in paid employment - a right denied to married women.

 

Another quotation published on last week’s free page refers to “the unwaged work that lesbian women have in common with other women”. Why just women? Gay men also do unwaged housework, as do single heterosexual men, widowers and enlightened married men. Should we all be paid by the State for doing our own housework? Why should the State care if we stop doing this unpaid work and are content to live in squalor and eat off unwashed dishes, or in cafes if we don’t want the unpaid chore of shopping? Sincerely, John Clift, Wood Green, N22.’ (Tony’s letter).

 

Sometime that summer I got a real scare, which was perhaps a dress rehearsal for what was to occur just over a year later. George rang me at work, obviously in great distress, and asked me to get a taxi home immediately and take him to St Thomas’s Casualty department. He was suffering terrible stomach pains, and was obviously scared he was going to die. He had been drinking quite a bit lately, and I know he had fears he might have damaged his liver.

 

As I rushed home terrible thoughts ran through my head as I hoped I wouldn’t arrive too late. I tried to imagine life without George, and couldn’t face it. I got home and took George to the hospital, where we had to sit in Casualty for ages. When George finally got seen the doctor was very unsympathetic, and virtually told him off for wasting the hospital’s time. He just had a rather severe case of food poisoning. It was a great relief to us, and George put it down to some pie and mash he had eaten in a shop a few days before, which he felt had tasted a bit strange at the time.

 

This little drama is extremely significant, since it shows, when faced with a potential health crisis, George was willing to call me at work to take him to a hospital for treatment, even though he feared and distrusted hospitals. The fact that he so desperately avoided going to hospital or even seeing a doctor during the final stages of his terminal illness can surely only testify that he suspected what was wrong with him (AIDS), and didn’t want it confirmed. To protect both himself, me, our friends and families he would have preferred to suffer alone and die undiagnosed. He always said he would go to hospital as a last resort if he really had to, and the fact that he avoided it during his last months and weeks when he knew he was so ill contrasts strongly with this desperate plea for me to leave work and take him to hospital at the first pangs of stomach pain from eating a gone off pie. It took great courage for him to visit Casualty on this occasion - his father had died from cancer, and it must have crossed George’s mind that his abdominal pain could have been a symptom of that disease. However, obviously cancer didn’t have the stigma for him that HIV-infection did.

 

Early in August we went down to Brighton one Sunday and we saw a gay revue at the Pavilion Theatre called ‘Cabaret Cares’. Several times we saw similar shows in Brighton and elsewhere, so I can’t remember the details of this one. I do know on one occasion we left Brighton on the last train and arrived back at Clapham Junction in the early hours of the morning to find an old lady wandering around in the street on the edge of our estate. She was confused, and we were worried she might get mugged or run over. There was an old people’s home nearby, but she insisted she didn’t live there. She claimed to have a flat of her own, but that she had locked herself out. Her social worker had taken the only key to the premises in order to stop the old lady wandering outside.

 

One of us stayed with the old woman whilst the other went to our flat to call the police. They didn’t really want to know, but eventually the fire brigade arrived and with the help of a ladder got into the woman’s upstairs flat through a partly opened window and managed to carry her in, since she had great difficulty climbing the stairs herself.

 

George was incensed by the thought of this old lady living on her own when totally incapable, and even more angry with the social worker who took the only key to the premises, making the woman a prisoner in her own home, and insuring if she did go out she would be trapped.  He wrote the council social services department complaining about it, and they wrote back explaining that it was a very difficult situation and they could not force anyone into sheltered accommodation against their will, but thanking us for our help and concern.

 

To celebrate our 20^th anniversary of meeting on September 10^th we went to the Bloomsbury Theatre to see ‘Once A Catholic’, a very funny pay which we had seen years before.

 

On September 21^st we were off to Lloret again, unknown to us for the last time together. It was a night flight leaving Gatwick at ten to midnight.

 

As we arrived at our hotel in Lloret we immediately noticed a difference to the main street nearby, leading down from the bus station to the sea. The ‘canal’ (containing only a trickle of water in the summer) had been covered over so the roads which ran each side were now joined together to make a wide thoroughfare. Otherwise Lloret was much the same, and we did all the usual things during our two week stay.

 

We visited nearby Tossa De Mar, fed the stray cats of Lloret up on the cliffs, and we took a bus trip to Barcelona, where we again visited the Sagrada Familia. This time we sat in the little park opposite the original nativity facade and had a peaceful view of Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece from across a lake. We also visited one of Gaudi’s other buildings, the Casa Mila. We had been on the fantastic roof of this building on an earlier trip, but this time we were able to see inside as they had an exhibition on one of the floors. It was a big disappointment as little of Gaudi’s original interior was left. Much of the undulating ceiling had been removed or boxed in with ceiling tiles. It was depressing, and all we could hope was that it would be restored some day. The most interesting feature was the original balcony, to which we were able to gain access and study in close detail the molding of the building itself and the wrought ironwork on the balcony. I wanted George to pose for a picture on the balcony, or looking out of the window, but he was irritable and wanted to leave. I soon found out why, his mouth was hurting very badly.

 

The mouth ulcers (oral thrush) which were a symptom of the dreadful disease which would steal him from me a year later were causing him great pain that day, and we left the Casa Mila in search of a pharmacy. We got some ointment for his mouth, but it only gave temporary relief as we boarded the bus back to Lloret.

 

Of course I didn’t see this mouth trouble as a symptom of anything serious, as all such thoughts were immediately pushed to the back of my mind as fanciful nonsense. I was in denial, but I can’t honestly say whether George had the same attitude or whether he just pretended he didn’t know it could be a symptom of HIV infection for my sake.

 

There was, however, another chilling omen of his terminal illness a year later. As we were walking up a little street near our hotel in Lloret, George suddenly looked around, and I knew something was wrong. He told me he had heard someone call his name, and as he looked around he saw our deceased former next door neighbor, Levy, waving at him. He shuddered and said that it was Death calling. Needless to say I couldn’t see anyone waving, and I certainly never heard anyone call his name. When I visited Lloret again after George’s death I studied the spot where George had said he saw Levy waving and calling his name, and it was outside a bar with the word ‘L’avi’ in its name, written above the door, which of course was very similar to Levy’s name. I cannot remember the exact date or time George saw and heard this psychic phenomenon, but it would have been a year before he lay on his deathbed. It could even have been the very day, hour and minute of his death a year later. I think it was late afternoon, and George died just before 5pm.

 

The only really unusual thing we did on this holiday was to go on the annual Catalonian walk right through Lloret, and across rugged countryside each side. We had to register to take part, and then rise early to be on Lloret beach for the boats to take us to the start of the walk. To keep us going we had the promise of some free wine and a sardine barbecue at the end. We went on this walk on September 30^th, the day before we flew home and the first day of George’s last year on Earth. Certainly there was little wrong with him that day as we completed the grueling walk, at times having to haul ourselves up steep hillsides with the help of a rope banister. As we neared the end it started to rain, and we arrived at the beach where they were holding the barbecue to find queues a mile long for some fly-blown sardine and tomato sandwiches. These were nothing like English ones, as the sardines were large fish baked over a grill, and served in French-style bread with a hot tomato. However, neither of us could face them as flies were swarming all over the food, so we made do with some wine, and boarded the boat back to Lloret, feeling we had achieved something by completing the route, which took all day. Less than a year later, in Jersey, George would not even be able to walk up a slight incline without resting and panting for breath, but this day he successfully completed a marathon.

 

We had booked our hotel room for an extra night so we could spend our last day on the beach without worrying about our luggage. That evening we caught a flight to Gatwick, and George said goodbye to Lloret for what was to be his last time. I went back once with a friend, and was sorry I did. Everything had changed, our favorite eating and drinking places gone, and there were reminders of George everywhere. I vowed never to go back again.

 

We arrived back home, and later that month went to the Lyric Hammersmith to see the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre production of Graham Greene’s ‘Travels With My Aunt’, but were disappointed to find it was an avant-garde production in which actors with mustaches suddenly broke into falsetto and became the ‘aunt’ of the title. Everyone played the aunt at different times yet there was no female on stage at any time, nor more than just a hint of drag such as a woman’s hat, scarf or handbag.

 

I had spotted an item in the gay press saying that the Channel 4 program ‘Out On Tuesday’ was looking for gays whose homes reflected their lifestyle. They were seeking unusual decoration, etc. for a light-hearted touch to offset the hardship depicted in a serious feature about the housing problems of gay men and lesbians. I wrote off, and the program makers paid us a visit in November to look at George’s collages. The director and producer came and were very impressed, arranging a date for filming. They explained it would only be a short piece to supplement the program’s main stories.

 

George and I both had credit cards, though we rarely used them. Occasionally we’d buy theater tickets or pay a holiday with them, and always we paid up promptly to avoid paying any interest. Suddenly on George’s statement a charge appeared of £100 or so for goods bought from some leather shop in northwest London, of which George had no knowledge whatsoever. A long argument started with the credit card company, in which they kept sending threatening letters and George wrote back demanding they remove this charge from his statement as he had never ordered the goods. The credit card company only canceled the ‘debt’ after George died, but a month or two before his death exactly the same thing happened to me. I lost my credit card and reported it immediately, getting a replacement. I had never used this replacement card (which obviously had a different number to the canceled lost card) yet I got an invoice charged to the new card for goods or services I had never ordered. I eventually got this canceled, but it does show the danger of having credit cards and the necessity for a change in the law. At the moment credit card companies can make a mistake and you are expected to pay for it. They should not be able to charge you for anything unless they can produce your signature for the goods or services ordered. This means mail order items, theater tickets and anything ordered over the phone by credit card should require the signature of the credit card holder before they can be handed over by the postman, courier, box office or whatever. Otherwise the road is wide open for fraud from unscrupulous individuals or companies to charge what they like to your credit card account, and bully you into paying for things you never ordered.

 

Of course most yuppies use their credit cards so much they wouldn’t have a clue what they’d ordered and would just pay up. Once George was on a local bus in Battersea (South Chelsea in yuppie-speak) and one of these newly imported yuppies got on and tried to pay his bus fare by credit card! We fumed when we queued up behind them in the supermarket, and made loud disparaging remarks about living on credit and inconveniencing everyone else in the process. Now it has become commonplace and is probably as quick as cash, but it never seemed that way when they were first introduced.

 

One Saturday in November we went on a demonstration against the Gulf War, now looming up ahead of us following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

 

A few days later we went to the Blue Cross Animal Hospital in Victoria, which had claimed two of our cats over the last four years, and got ‘Tibby’ (named by George after an aunt of his), the friend who has been so precious to me since George died. We decided before we went that if there was any cat which was lame, injured or deformed in any way we would take that one, since many people might refuse it. There was indeed a cat with a bad leg, but George knew Tibby was the cat for us as soon as he saw her. He had an affinity with animals, and he just knew how affectionate she was. When we saw her she had a big plastic collar around her neck. She had just been spayed, and it turned out she was pregnant so she lost her kittens.

 

The Blue Cross told us someone had brought her in saying she was a stray, but they suspected it was his cat and he brought her in because she was pregnant. They said he knew too much about her for her to be a stray, and they said she was 6 years old. We never believed this since she was so small; we thought she was much younger, just a year or two old. But years later she is no bigger, so possibly that was her correct age when we got her.

 

She loved and was loved by both George and myself, and since he died she has been such a friend and comfort to me. It was as if George chose a companion for me to see me through the dark days ahead without him, and he couldn’t have chosen a better one. He must have known he wouldn’t be around long because as we lay in bed some nights with the cat next to us, or snuggled up under the covers between us, he would pet and stroke her in his own special way and tell me to watch as I would have to do it when he wasn’t around. I have tried, but I never have succeeded in petting her the way he did. He had that special touch which I could never learn. Many of my memories of George are of him petting cats and dogs all round the world, who all responded to him in a special way. He should have worked with animals.

 

In December the film crew from Channel 4 arrived at 8.30 in the morning and were there for most of the morning. It took a huge crew with a light set up on a pole in the garden below (which belonged to another flat) shining through our window to film the music room collage, and then they could only film one wall properly. Since this wasn’t the wall with any gay images, George had to alter all his collage so they could get these in.

 

We sat on the couch looking (or pretending to look) at a Dolly Parton album cover (from the local record library). This was because the collage had a musical theme, and the room was where we listened to our records. They then asked us if we would be willing to kiss each other. George said yes, and I agreed, but George told me afterwards I had such a look of horror on my face it was as if they had said I was about to be shot.

 

This may not be too far from the truth as it was the last thing I expected. To go on a gay TV program is one thing, to kiss in public is something else, but to kiss on TV in front of millions is something else again. I remembered George’s cousin who thought it was a moral outrage for a man and woman to kiss in public - what on Earth would she think if she saw us kissing on TV?

 

I wanted all our friends and relations to see the program, but we were always very careful in front of our families never to kiss or show physical signs of affection in public. It would embarrass them and us, and as I state above, even if we were a heterosexual couple it would be frowned on in some quarters.

 

Anyway, I agreed, but I was not happy about it as it seemed to restrict the number of people we could tell to watch the program. George’s cousin was off the list for a start. Also, I didn’t know how my mother would react, or my aunt. They knew we were gay, but to have it rammed down their throats by us kissing on TV, when we wouldn’t dream of kissing in their presence, seemed to need some explanation. George saw it quite differently: it was a gay program so it was natural we should kiss.

 

Ideally, gays should be able to hold hands and kiss in public, but this kind of behavior even by straight couples can be highly embarrassing for third parties. To kiss on TV has the added very real danger of encouraging homophobic attacks. If someone anti-gay recognized us on TV in a gay program that might encourage them to shout some abusive remark, but if they actually saw us kissing I was afraid it could rile them and incite them to violence. Suppose some gang waylaid me or George and beat us up or murdered us one night just because they had seen us kissing on TV?

 

All these things had to be considered, and I thought the TV crew were quite wrong to spring this on us without notice or time to discuss and consider the implications. When two male characters in the soap EastEnders kissed on screen years afterwards it caused a big rumpus in the tabloids, yet here were we expected to break the taboos on TV without any warning whatsoever, or even the defense that we were acting. It was a huge decision to make, but we had only seconds to make it. In the event we did it, and it led to a row between me and George afterwards. Trying to prepare my mother for what she might see on screen when I was talking to her on the phone about the filming I said:

 

‘We had to do what they told us’ or words to that effect, and George blew his top. He said:

 

‘This film could be our obituary’, (so he obviously did know he was dying), ‘and you are ashamed to kiss me, and you tell your mother you had to do it because they told us to.’

 

Okay, so I chose my words badly, but what I meant was we didn’t get on camera in a TV program about gay housing featuring George’s collage and just decide to make an exhibition of ourselves by kissing. It was suggested to us by the film crew, and we agreed to do it. This is how George wanted me to put it, but I have never been good at the spoken word or on the phone. It often comes out all wrong, which is why I prefer to write things down.

 

This row still hurts me deeply, as the film did indeed prove to be our obituary. The kiss was never shown, although the director later told us it was ‘the sweetest kiss’ she had ever seen on screen. This was because we kept kissing (we had to do the shot over and over) and then saying ‘I love you’ looking into each other’s eyes and really meaning it. George was very upset when they only showed a few seconds of the collage, with a glimpse of us on the couch looking at the Dolly Parton album - blink and you could have missed us. I suppose I was secretly relieved that the kiss wasn’t broadcast, because of the reaction it might cause particularly from George’s cousin and possibly my mother, not to mention people I or George might meet in the street.

 

I suppose I was a coward, but it did seem slightly out of context. I felt we were making enough of a coming out statement by appearing together in a gay program as a couple, without kissing on screen. In reality we kissed each other on the lips very seldom, probably once a year at New Year, or perhaps on birthdays. So not only was it a false picture of how we normally behaved, I felt we were being exploited for sensationalism by the film crew. After all, they could have asked us if we were willing to kiss weeks ago when they visited us and let us talk it over, not sprung it on us at the last moment.

 

Now, of course, I am glad we did it, as I have a permanent record of our love (I eventually managed to purchase the unedited video, complete with the repeated kissing, from the video company after George’s death). I have even showed the tape to my mother, but would still never show it to his cousin, and I would still have qualms about it being broadcast. (I have since met a married guy who cares about me and used to kiss me in public without even thinking, it is so normal for him. I now try to cope with it without worrying, but you never know if a gang of homophobes might see and react in a violent way. Still, I feel I am learning a lesson and helping to overcome prejudice and gain acceptance for public shows of affection between men whenever I do it. Kissing in public has never been taboo for two women.)

 

The film crew also shot George’s toilet collage with great difficulty because of the lack of space, but this footage wasn’t used. The filters and camera angles they used left a lot to be desired, and the toilet shots on the unedited video did not come out well at all. Lack of sufficient light could have been another problem.

 

The main collage came our perfectly on a hand-held camera in an amateur video done by a friend of George’s at Oxfam, to which I added a musical soundtrack of George’s choosing to fit the collage pictures. It goes to show all that paraphernalia and huge film crew was a complete waste of time and money - the hand held camera got much better results, no collage pictures had to be moved and much, much greater detail was shown. All you could see in the TV video was a section of the collage from a distance, with no close-ups at all. Of the two videos, this amateur one is far superior and captures the detail of the collage. The TV video is precious to me as a record of our love, and the best moving (but unfortunately silent) pictures I have of George. I am sorry the kiss will forever be marred by that argument, but I still maintain it was a very brave thing for both of us to do, and that if shown on TV it could have broken relations with his cousin for good, and possibly caused one or both of us aggro on the streets in the days following the broadcast.

 

That last Christmas we could have spent together I went to my mother’s, who was now back in Welwyn Garden City. I felt I had to be with her that year as we were away in Germany the year before and had already booked Christmas in Paris for 1991. It is strange, and sad, that the first Christmas I knew George he spent it on his own and I was in Welwyn Garden City with my mother, grandparents and brother. The only other time in our 21 years together George was on his own and I was in Welwyn Garden City was that last Christmas. Some years in between I would spend Christmas with my mother whilst George would be down Hastings with Rose and Neil, but in 1990 George chose to ‘ignore Christmas’, as he put it, so was on his own with just Tibby our cat for company. (Once when my mother asked what we were planning to do for Christmas George couldn’t resist saying ‘ignore it’, much to her annoyance.)

 

We did go down to Hastings together for New Year. It was nothing very exciting. We had been promised a party in the straight pub almost next door to where Neil and Rose live, but in the event it was a very quiet evening, not like New Year at all. As we sat in the bar a man who looked like a tramp started talking to George. Midnight came and went with barely a murmur, just a few ‘Happy New Year's.

 

Eventually, about 2 a.m., the crowd was thinning out a bit and we were invited upstairs to this special party for the pub regulars. Naturally we expected free drinks and food, only to find the bar had simply been transferred upstairs, and there we were sat in a corner expected to pay for drinks with very little food in evidence at all. Whenever a plate of sandwiches did appear everyone swooped on it like vultures and it was stripped bare in seconds. After managing to grab about one sandwich each and paying for several drinks, we decided we’d had enough and went back to Rose and Neil’s flat. Here, I presume, I got my last New Year’s kiss from George, though I’m afraid I can’t remember now. He always did kiss me at New Year, and I can hardly imagine him doing it in the straight pub, even if he was willing to do it for the TV cameras. But the important thing was we saw the New Year in together, little knowing (for my part at least) that it was to be the last year we would see in together. By the end of the year I would be an AIDS widower, facing the possibility of a life of loneliness and memories stretching endlessly ahead of me for maybe 40 or 50 years.

 

Into that fateful New Year of 1991, and on the last day of January we were once again part of the audience for the BBC’s ‘Question Time’, recorded at the Barbican Centre. It was the height of the Gulf War and so many of the questions related to this. At the very end I managed to get in a supplementary question, or rather, a comment, and several people later said they saw both me and George. Of course we had recorded the program and played back the brief glimpse of ourselves and my nervous question/comment, but unfortunately we did not keep it.

 

Two days later there was a big anti-Gulf War demo in central London, and as we assembled by Big Ben a man I had never met recognized me from my brief TV appearance two days before, and said he agreed with my anti-Gulf War comment. This was my brief career as a TV celebrity, my ‘15 minutes of fame’ as described by Andy Warhol, though in this case it was more like 15 seconds.

 

In February Chas and Dave were on at the Fairfield Hall Croydon, a date George had noted in his diary. I can’t remember for sure if we went on this occasion, but we certainly saw them in concert in Hastings with Rose another time. They were two artists we both liked, and George was actually a member of their fan club. We loved Music Hall type entertainment, especially the songs, and of course this was typical Chas and Dave. Chas was also a great rock’n’roll and Jerry Lee Lewis fan, and even played guitar (not his usual piano) in Jerry’s backing group on one tour of the UK, and also duetted with him on an album track.

 

On Friday March 1^st we were due to fly out of Gatwick early in the morning for Austria to begin a tour which included Czechoslovakia and Hungary, our first and last venture together into the new post-Communist Eastern Europe.

 

The night before, however, George was in a very difficult mood. Whether it was something to do with his HIV+ condition I don’t know, but he certainly acted strangely in those last few months on several occasions. He had not done any packing or preparations, and was just laying in bed asleep. This was totally out of character for he just lived for his holidays and loved preparing for them. I kept trying to wake him and get him to start packing, but he just kept saying infuriatingly that he didn’t want to go and that I should go on my own.

 

I was desperate, and whined ‘Don’t do this to me’, but he just would not budge. Eventually he admitted that if he went he was afraid the plane would crash. Apparently Roy, who had died of a heart attack some time ago, had planted a hypnotic suggestion in George’s mind that once Roy had died George would follow soon after. Tragically, this proved to be the case, but he was not to die in an air crash.

 

All I could do was pack George’s case for him, just hoping I had chosen the clothes and things he wanted. Early next morning I managed to get him up and on the train in time for the flight. From then on everything was OK, and we both enjoyed our last happy holiday together.

 

We flew to Linz airport a few hours before Jerry Lee Lewis (my favorite singer) was due to arrive there for a tour, but we couldn’t hang around as we had to board our tour coach to take us to Vienna. This was a city we had visited with Roy many years ago, soon after George and I met. Now we were paying a return visit just before we parted.

 

In early March the weather was quite cold and overcast, and we wore overcoats as we paid a return visit to the Schoenbrunn Palace and the nearby orangery. Our hotel was situated right in the center of Vienna on the main central ring road by a twin-spired church. Here, in the dining room, we got our first real look at another gay couple who were to become firm friends, Dirk and Paul.

 

As we were eating we discussed the fact that they looked like a gay couple, and remarked on the superficial similarity in appearance between the one with longish blond hair (Dirk) and our friend Andre, whose hair used to be in similar style, but brown. I wondered if we would get an opportunity to speak to them, and George said we should bide our time till we were a few days into the tour.

 

On the way out of Vienna en route to Budapest, the coach stopped in the suburbs so we could visit the Hundertwasserhaus, a very unusual 20^th Century apartment block, in which many of the upper story flats had very rural looking gardens on the roofs of other apartments below. The whole complex looked very odd from the outside, with bits added on here and there in various architectural styles, with a garish color scheme in which the outside of each apartment was painted a different color. The overall impression was one of delightful anarchy and chaos: a pile of oversized brightly colored children’s building blocks with covered staircases added on, and trees, plants, statues, ornate chimneys, globes and onion domes sprouting from the various roof levels.

 

We went under an arch into the main courtyard, and inside to a souvenir shop. As I was looking at the postcards, George came over and showed me a little booklet filled with color pictures of the inside and outside of the building, with lots of detail. I regret to say this led to some harsh words from me, as I bought the book thinking it was much cheaper than it turned out to be, and then blamed George. I shouted something at him about how much it cost, but I am really sorry now as it was well worth it, whatever it cost. This was one of the architectural wonders of the modern world, and reminded us very much of Gaudi’s work in and around Barcelona.

 

We drove eastwards, crossed the Hungarian border and stopped for lunch at a town called Gyor, which had an impressive civic building. En route to Budapest we also passed an unusual restaurant which had the front part of an airliner emerging from its outer window. Whether the rest of the airliner was inside the restaurant I can’t say.

 

One of the things which had encouraged us to come to Budapest was a TV program which had shown the inside of St Mattias Church. When we arrived and saw the real thing it was something of a disappointment. A circular stained glass window set in a concentric swirl of colored marble or stonework we had seen on TV, but it looked rather small and less impressive in reality, and the outside of the gothic church was nothing special. The back view was the best, since the roof was visible with its colored mosaics. This facade overlooked Fisherman’s Bastion, a kind of white fortified wall with conical turrets. All these buildings were on a hill overlooking the Danube, and in the mist beyond one could see the Hungarian Parliament Building and other landmarks. The twin cities of Buda and Pest were divided by the Danube flowing between them.

 

We were staying in an hotel on one of the main thoroughfares, near a big railway terminus. A flyover for traffic went right below our window. The street was full of shops, many of them newly privatized since the fall of Communism. In the subways which led to the railway station and the metro, hawkers sold everything you could imagine. Old grannies would hold up dresses and other clothes, and you had to walk a gauntlet of people waving tatty rags and other shoddy goods in our faces. We later learned these people were mainly Romanians (or was it Romanies?) who came into Budapest each day to sell things in order to make a living, but with so little to sell it hardly seemed worth the bother. None of them had stalls, and each only seemed to have one or two tatty items to sell.

 

We went on a city tour, which visited the main war memorial and some castle-like building. Here we saw evidence of the fall of Communism in the shape of a stall selling military uniforms and badges from the old regimes of Eastern Europe as tourist souvenirs. Soviet Red Army fur caps sporting the hammer and sickle were a particularly popular line. (25 years earlier a Red Army shop in Nevsky Prospekt, Leningrad had refused to sell me a hammer and sickle red star badge because I wasn’t in the Soviet armed forces.)

 

On our first evening in Budapest we wandered around the streets before going in for our evening meal. This was held in a large room, with a small gipsy-type band playing. I think it was a trio, and certainly a violin featured prominently. This out of tune band assaulted our ear-drums whilst we ate, and then had the nerve to come round the table begging for money. George refused to give them anything. We were all sat round a huge circular table, and Dirk and Paul, the gay couple we had spotted in Vienna, were sitting near us. George laughed off the incident with the band, saying he liked good music but was not going to pay to hear an out of tune violin, or words to that effect. This broke the ice, and from then on we became friendly with Dirk and Paul.

 

In Budapest we found a lovely cake shop where you queued up for the most delicious cream cakes. We also managed to find a rather depressing self-service canteen, surely a left-over from Communist days since it looked so bleak and uninviting. We got a passable meal there, and it was at least very cheap.

 

Before leaving Budapest, I went off in search of Fats Domino. I had seen posters all over town announcing he would be playing, as I thought, that day, which I believe was March 4^th. I eventually found the huge bleak stadium almost deserted, and after walking around for ages ventured into a little office and tried to explain to Hungarians who spoke no English that I was looking for the Fats Domino concert. I can’t remember how, but it gradually dawned on me that Maj 4 meant May 4^th, not March 4^th - I was two months too early for the concert! So I went back on the Metro to the hotel, where George was waiting in our hotel room, and sheepishly told him of my wasted journey.

 

Next day we set off and crossed into the short-lived Czecho-Slovak Federal Republic (which superseded the Czecho-Slovak Socialist Republic and preceded the separate Slovak and Czech republics). We stopped for lunch in Bratislava, soon to become the capital of the Slovak Republic. While the others had a meal in the hotel recommended by the tour guide, we decided to explore and had an excellent meal in a self-service restaurant, complete with beer and dessert, for a couple of pounds. We then had time to go round the back streets and alleyways sightseeing, and still be back at the coach before the others came out from what Dirk and Paul said was a rather expensive and unsatisfactory lunch. We told them about the self-service restaurant we had found, and they said they wished they had come with us. As we were to discover, they were not the least bit snobbish (or ‘piss-elegant’ as George would say), and as ready for a bargain as we were.

 

In Prague, our city sightseeing started off at a church which had also been a monastery, then we walked up to the Presidential Palace or Castle, where the new President, Vaclev Havel (former dissident poet) had decked the guards out in a very camp, theatrical uniform which included fur collars. We were taken inside to see a very old hall, and finally emerged in a street of miniature houses, now turned into tourist shops. In one of these houses once lived Kafka.

 

Whist in Prague we also visited the Apostle’s Clock and Tower, where figurines appear on the hour, nearby Town Square, the huge Wenceslas Square and Charles Bridge, now a pedestrian precinct, resplendent with its statues. We also found the big domed theater and adjoining gate tower very impressive, as was the Opera House where George, myself, Dirk and Paul all saw a Czech opera for £2.50 each, sitting in the best seats of the house. We went by tram under our own steam, but the next day our tour guide was offering seats for at least twice this. When we challenged her, she said the price differential was the cost of the coach to take people there and back. What she meant, of course, was that she charged everyone double the real price, and split the extra money with the coach driver. Since the Opera, like everything else in Czechoslovakia at the time, was so ridiculously cheap the tourists were still getting an incredible bargain.

 

Dirk and Paul became firm friends in Prague, and we walked around the city together, eating in a self-service restaurant we found and getting tremendous value for money. Dirk, Paul and George were amazed at the selection of classical records on sale at bargain prices and bought quite a few to take back home.

 

One thing George found was that the cobbled streets made his feet tired. It seemed on every holiday recently there was something wrong. In Barcelona six months earlier it had been George’s mouth problems, now it was his feet. I think I said something rather insensitive along these lines, for he apologized, but little did I know the next and last holiday we would take together, in Jersey in another six months, he would have something really wrong with him: a fatal kind of pneumonia which left him unable to walk the slightest incline or even shave without getting out of breath and exhausted.

 

In Prague, though, this nightmare was yet to come, and George had made two lifelong friends for me. Unlike many of George’s other friends who were now mine too, Dirk and Paul were an intelligent, responsible and stable couple who were able to reciprocate any hospitality offered.

 

George used to moan: ‘Why am I surrounded by lame ducks?’

 

I am not sure if I was included in that description, but certainly a lot of our friends fell into that category, constantly needing help and advice from George, some unable to find their way from A to B and too scared to venture outside their homes after dark, or go any distance without an escort. Among other things, George had helped a cleaner get a job as a telex operator and a middle-aged prostitute come off the game and get a steady job.

 

Dirk and Paul proved to be two friends whom we hit it off with. They had been together one year longer than us, and as we discovered in Prague, they were not snobs and enjoyed  bargains such as self-service restaurants offering good cheap food. They also shared George’s love of the opera and classical music. It is tragic he only met someone of equal intelligence who shared his taste for good music and the fine arts just months before he died. However, he made two very good friends for me, and he knew it. As he lay dying, it was Dirk and Paul he told me to ring for support.

 

George was thinking of buying a pair of shoes in Prague since they were so cheap, but he never got around to it. I think we settled for a jar of coffee and some other small items, including a bottle of wine bought at the Hungarian-Czechoslovak border.

 

Soon after midday on Friday 8^th we caught our plane from Prague airport back to London. It was to be the last flight we would ever take together, and the last time George was to set foot on Continental Europe.

 

We arrived back to thick snow on the ground, proven by the fact that I took a photo from our window of a snowman in the garden below our flat.

 

At Easter, which fell at the end of March, the visitors from Hell descended on us in the shape of George’s sister Betty, her son Charles, his wife Marion and their kids, who screamed non-stop throughout their entire stay. The parents and grandmother got plastered each night on cans of Special Brew. They insisted on having the windows and curtains open late into the night because our flat was ‘too warrum’ even in March/April, so all the neighbors could see and hear these antics which went on well into the early hours. (The children, both under 10, were never in bed before the parents at about 2 a.m.).

 

If the ‘weans’ were screaming at 1 a.m. in the morning, George would say something about keeping the noise down because of the neighbors, and Charles would bawl out at the top of his voice:

 

‘Hey yous, stop tha’ greetin’ else ah’ll belt yous’ or something similar, which had absolutely no effect on the brats from Hell and only added to the disturbance the whole family were causing to the neighborhood, bringing a flavor of Glasgow’s notorious Easterhouse to London’s Battersea.

 

They arrived on Good Friday (or ‘Bad’ Friday as far as we were concerned), and on Easter Saturday we took them to the Bethnal Green Childhood Museum. They had driven down in the car, and were able to park it almost anywhere as it had a disabled sticker. This was because it belonged to Betty, who was disabled on account of a previous ankle injury and a serious heart condition (she’d had a heart bypass). As we were going into the lobby of the museum one of the kids ran out and nearly got run over in the driveway. This started an argument as Charles and Betty accused Marion of not keeping an eye on ‘her’ kids, though why she should be singled out for blame I don’t know. Obviously political correctness and the new man hadn’t reached Easterhouse.  Nevertheless Marion did seem to be in a sort of dream much of the time.

 

On the Sunday we took them to the Easter Parade in Battersea Park. (It turned out to be the last ever Parade, as Wandsworth Council, who had taken over the park from the old GLC, stopped it after that year.)

 

They spent ages getting ready, and dressing the little girl up in a beautiful silk purple dress with frills and bows. As we were walking to the park they stupidly decided to buy soft ice-creams for everyone, and of course the child immediately managed to get most of it down her expensive new dress, even before we got to the Parade. Once there, they showed no interest at all in the Parade and went off to the playground, whilst George and I watched the procession. We were absolutely furious, and said to them as we went to collect them from the playground what on Earth was the point of coming down to London if all they wanted to do was go to a playground. They could have done this back in Glasgow. The Easter Parade in Battersea Park was an event people traveled miles to see.

 

We escaped that evening, as Lily Savage was doing a show at the Playhouse Theatre entitled ‘Not Another Command Performance’, but of course when we got back home another command performance was exactly what we got from the whole family visiting us.

 

One day we took them to a City Farm at Shadwell which they enjoyed very much. On one visit to the East End (I think we may have done the farm and museum the same day) they insisted on stopping to get fish and chips in the Hackney Road, although we warned them fish and chips in London were usually not worth buying, and nothing like a Glasgow ‘fish supper’. They wouldn’t listen, so we had to sit in the car for about half an hour waiting and spent a fortune for what they admitted was the worst ‘fish supper’ they had ever tasted in their lives, and the dearest.

 

I can’t remember how long they stayed, but we were very relieved when they got in their car to start the long journey north. George wrote them a letter soon after saying we had been threatened with eviction because the neighbors had complained about the noise going on till the early hours. I don’t think Betty believed George, but he made it quite clear he didn’t want any more screaming brats brought down to our flat, and certainly not two of them at a time.

 

One Friday in mid April it was the 40^th birthday of Red, Angel’s partner. The party was held in the 59 Club (the Rockers’ motorcycle social club founded by a vicar in 1959) and was then located off Hackney Road. Again George’s erratic behavior was apparent as he declined to come at the last minute, and I went on my own. He had recently also missed several cabaret appearances by ‘Dockyard Doris’, one of his favorite drag artists, then there was the reluctance to go on holiday at the last minute, and now this birthday party which he dropped out of without warning.

 

Every now and then I would come home and there would be a half-empty gin bottle on the coffee table. As likely as not George would be in bed asleep. The drinking bout would go on for a few days, during which time he would consume about a bottle a day. He would get very argumentative when drunk, and so I used to keep as quiet as possible. It was like walking on eggshells. He used to rant and rave at the TV, especially the news. I got worried about the neighbors myself, as he used to shout, and some of his remarks could be taken as quite offensive to people who didn’t know him. He would use strong language which sometimes suggested intolerance, but if ever he saw anybody in real trouble or need he would really put himself out to help them.

 

Once his drinking bout was over, he would stay off the booze for weeks at a time. I was worried for several reasons. It was a strain on me, worrying about the neighbors and saying the wrong thing which would upset him and send him off to bed in a huff. I was also worried about his health, and the effect on his liver. Also the sheer cost of 3 or 4 bottles of gin when he was on the dole.

 

On one occasion we were in bed after he had been drinking, and our little cat seemed reluctant to ‘kiss’ George as she often did. I made some insensitive remark about it might be the smell of the alcohol, and George was very hurt by it. He said it was a horrible thing to say. In retrospect, I suppose it was, but I didn’t mean it that way at the time.

 

He was worried about his intermittent drinking habits himself, and one day wrote me a note authorizing me to pour down the sink any alcohol I found on the premises. This really upset me as it was a cry for help, and yet I couldn’t do anything about it. If I did as he asked in the note it would not only cause an almighty row, but he would merely drink when I was out at work and try to hide the evidence from me. Already he did this on occasions, but I always knew when he had been drinking by his manner, and found the bottle hidden away somewhere. He confessed to me he too was worried about the effect on his liver, but of course I didn’t know the real reason for his acute depression and drinking. I thought it was just because he was out of a job for so long, which was bad enough, but I now think he suspected he was HIV+ and drank to escape facing the facts.

 

He had no-one he could confide in. He didn’t want to tell me, or any of his friends, and he was not the sort to seek counseling. He would counsel other people, but when it came to himself would not ask for help. Once he told me to be very careful to always practise safer sex as it would be terrible if one of us died of AIDS and had to explain this to friends and relatives. He wanted me to promise never to indulge in a certain sexual practice which British AIDS expertise considers relatively safe (oral sex), or at least to take precautions. Since we never had sex with each other in the later years, he was referring to other people I met. Although I promised to practise what British medical opinion considered safer sex, if I had in fact caught the HIV virus from this particular practice I would have felt very guilty, but I trusted the experts and it seemed to prove correct: the risk from oral sex was very small. (However 10 years after George died, I was myself diagnosed HIV+. Since I tested negative 2 years after George died, and had practised safer sex ever since, the medical conclusion was that the very slight risk presented by oral sex was increased by gingivitis, a gum disease I suffered from. I was luckier than George in that by the time I was diagnosed combination therapy was available to enable one to live with HIV indefinitely. Although oral sex was the most likey cause, it is also possible I became HIV+ via a broken condom or some other way.) George was also very unlucky in that he probably contacted the virus in America by the anal route before anybody anywhere in the world knew about the dangers or were taking precautions.

 

The point is, all this worry about the possibility of being HIV+ and the reaction of myself, friends and relatives added to the pressure of being out of work with no job in sight, must have made him almost suicidal. No wonder he drank occasionally. On one occasion I even rang Alcoholics Anonymous and was told of a partners’ group I could join, but in the event I never went. On several occasions when he was in the middle of one of his drinking sessions the thought crossed my mind that perhaps I should leave him, but I dismissed it immediately. I just loved him too much, and when you love someone you do not walk away when they need your help most. In any case, I could not have done it, I needed him too much - he was my world. It has been difficult enough carrying on since he died, but if I knew he was living anywhere on Earth I would have to be with him if it were at all possible, I just couldn’t stay away.

 

I remember all the good times he gave me, so the few difficult times are a small price to pay. Once I got the impression perhaps he wanted me to leave him, and actually asked him if he thought he would be better on his own. He looked at me and said:

 

‘Oh no, you are the only thing which keeps me going.’

 

It was the most wonderful thing anyone ever said to me. The feeling was mutual, because even though he has since died, the only thing which keeps me going is the thought of meeting him again in the next world. I think I might have committed suicide soon after he died if it were not for that belief, for I firmly believe if I do not complete my allotted life-span it could ruin our chances for a long-lasting reunion and progression to higher planes together. I don’t want to have to come back and learn to cope with bereavement, I’d rather learn that lesson this time around.

 

I am glad and proud that we stayed together for better or worse for 21 years, right till the very end when death parted us. I was there for him and he was there for me. He stuck by me through my fanatical embrace of Communism, he put up with my obsession with Jerry Lee Lewis and 1950s rock’n’roll and my ‘mental mind block’ on any music later than 1962, and all sorts of other things. We could have been a lot more sexually compatible, but our love transcended the sexual and became something much deeper and spiritual. I am so glad I didn’t walk away from him when he needed me most, just as he never walked away from me. I know we both passed the crucial test by staying together through thick and thin, and this is the important thing which will help us progress in the future. Of course, there were happy times as well, even in the last few months when his depression was getting worse.

 

Census Day was on April 21^st, so George was included for the last time. One of the best films we saw in our last few months together was Mike Leigh’s ‘Life Is Sweet’ starring Alison Steadman and Jane Horrocks, who played the teenager from Hell. We enjoyed the film but both felt it could have had a stronger ending.

 

That Spring we had our last photos taken together. My mother took one on a visit to our flat of George and me with our cat, Tibby. Then Channel 4's ‘Out’ program came to take what they termed ‘publicity shots’ for the program due to be screened in August. Since we were only a very small part of the program, it seemed highly unlikely any ‘publicity shots’ of us would be used in the TV guides, so George assumed it was just a perk for the photographers, and wondered if they even had film in their camera. As it turned out they did, and although the shots they took were never used to my knowledge, I was able to get hold of a selection after George’s death, and these professional photos are the last ones ever taken of us together. They were taken about May 1991, just four months before he died, but there is little evidence he is ill in the photos. A fish-eye lens makes him look a bit thin in one of the outside shots, but they are nice photos with both of us looking well and happy, and our cat Tibby is also in several of them.

 

I was later given some photos of George on a visit to our friend Lena’s flat in June 1991, and he looks the picture of health in these. I didn’t go with him to Lena’s on that occasion but his partner took the photos and they swear they were taken just three months before he died, just when his PCP cough was starting.

 

On the last day of April George went along to the Oxfam shop in Hammersmith to do some voluntary work. He fancied a change from the Oxfam book and record shop in Ealing, but the Hammersmith shop never worked out. I think he felt like an unwanted outsider amongst an army of women, and they had so many of these volunteers he felt superfluous. The Ealing shop was a long way to travel, and I think he was getting a bit fed up with doing much of the shop leader’s work without any credit. He generally enjoyed his work for Oxfam, especially at the Chelsea shop when he was shop leader. After he stopped going into the Ealing shop in February 1991 he never worked regularly for Oxfam again. Part of the reason was the DHSS, who made the last six months or so of his life absolute misery. I can never forgive them for what they did to George and presumably millions of other unemployed people: bullying them into going to so-called ‘Job Clubs’ - smoked filled rooms filled with largely illiterate job-seekers unable to read newspapers or write letters applying for jobs. All that was available in these Job Clubs was pen and paper, newspapers and people on hand to help people read the job adverts and compose a letter of reply. It was an insult to send someone of George’s intelligence to such a place! This was just a ruse to avoid giving the unemployed any useful training, but get them off the government’s rigged unemployment figures. George was afraid if they discovered he was working as a volunteer in a charity shop several days a week the DHSS would say he was not available for work and cut his benefit. The rules do, in fact, allow for voluntary work, but George was too scared to ask.

 

In early May we booked tickets to see ‘Les Miserables’ again, this time with our new friends Dirk and Paul. Since coming back from Prague we were in touch with them regularly. George and Dirk spoke for hours to each other on the telephone, and gradually got to know a lot more about each other. Had he lived, Dirk and Paul would have been the best friends George had made in a long while since they could have shared so much together discussing and enjoying classical music, opera and the ballet, but it was not to be.

 

In mid-May George went into one of his old charity shops to do some voluntary work. I think it was probably the last time he worked in such a shop. The manager was all too willing to take the credit and let George do most of his work. He was also a dreadful moaner, and very hard to work with.

 

On one occasion I went in to help, and decided to clear up the basement sales area and the stockroom next to it. Henry (the shop leader) moaned at me for hoovering and tidying up, and said he wanted it left in as much mess as possible so the area manager could see on his/her next visit how much Henry needed help.

 

George and his friend Rita, who both used to work in this shop, could sit for hours telling stories about Henry. Like the day George was in the basement and Henry could not be bothered to come down the stairs with a plastic bag full of stuff someone had brought in which needed sorting. He threw it down the stairs and smashed all the crockery, ornaments and glasses it contained. He must have known from the sound and weight it didn’t just contain clothes.

 

On another occasion a woman came in with a donation saying: ‘I do so admire what this charity does for the starving.’

 

Henry replied: ‘Well I’m starving, and they don’t do anything for me’.

 

The poor woman took him literally and gave him money to buy himself a meal. Henry went out and bought a take away, and then threw most of it in the bin because he didn’t like it. Since he breakfasted at Selfridges every morning he was hardly starving or short of money. He even got the charity to move him out to Buckinghamshire where he used to live, and then move him back to London again because he didn’t like it after all. He was a walking disaster area, and always had terrible tales of woe to relate.

 

When the shop was closed one day and he was in there on his own, he claimed a gang of skinheads pissed through the letterbox. He arrived late for one of our parties, and claimed he had almost been run down by a bus. If half these misfortunes really did happen to him he must have led a charmed life to have lived to pensionable age.

 

In May I took a day off work and we went to the Brighton Festival to see a play called ‘The Rose Tattoo’ in the afternoon, and Lily Savage in a show that evening, a sort of early treat for George nearly two weeks before his birthday. We enjoyed both shows, but George had some trouble with his new hearing aid during the play. I kept hearing a high pitched whistle coming from it. Since it was the first time he’d worn it he wasn’t used to it, or how to adjust the volume to stop the whistling. It was possibly also the last time he used it.

 

This was our very last visit to Brighton together. Apart from the shows I can’t remember the details, as we went there so often. We never did the gay scene there, and were content to explore the little shopping streets near the station such as Kensington Gardens, and buy some fish and chips to eat on the way. In good weather I would love to sit on the beach and go for a swim, and we nearly always had a walk along the pier. When I went back to Brighton with a so-called ‘friend’ who I soon discovered was just abusing my friendship I was very sad because he didn’t want to do any of the simple things George and I enjoyed doing. When I suggested a walk along the pier he said pompously: ‘I think not’.

 

What he did want to do is be seen in all the right places, spend an awful lot of money and eat in expensive restaurants. We didn’t do anything that weekend in Brighton we couldn’t have done in London, since the gay scene there has exactly the same cabaret, except the Brighton gay pubs are smaller and more crowded so you can’t actually see anything in comfort. We stayed in a supposedly ‘gay hotel’, which was in fact a gay owned boarding house where they ripped you off just for the privilege of not being with heterosexuals. George and I never stayed overnight in Brighton, and if we had it would have been a cheap B&B - we wouldn’t even dream of staying in a gay hotel because we knew most were rip-offs full of posey piss-elegant queens.

 

On the Monday following our Brighton visit George had a restart interview with the D.O.E..  It was a complete waste of time. The word ‘interview’ was a misnomer for ‘lecture’, and anything the unemployed person said, such as ‘I need retraining or a chance to go to university’, was totally ignored. That, at least, was George’s unhappy experience.

 

On May 27^th, his 48^th and last birthday, we went to the Barbican Centre to see the film ‘The Ballad Of The Sad Café’. Next day George was due to go to a Job Club in the morning, but he didn’t go. This was all the restart interviewer could offer him - sitting in a smoky room looking at job adverts. No training, no real help or understanding of his impossible situation whatsoever: He was 48 and not trained for anything since his line of work was now obsolete. Since the introduction of C.V.s it was not even possible to get an interview, since few people of his age were even short-listed for unskilled, non-managerial jobs. The following week he had to go for yet another interview, this time with the D.O.E. in Putney, but it was no more productive than the others and no offer of training came from it.

 

In June we went to the local Latchmere Theatre, upstairs above a pub, to see two short plays, one of which we had seen on TV and the other one was gay. The collective title was ‘Office Works’ since that was their subject matter. George was rather critical of me because I bought a kebab at the shop next door and had to bolt it down quickly in order to be in time for the plays. He probably thought the smell of it would linger into the theater, as he had told me never to eat certain well-known hamburgers before going to the theater as, he claimed, they left a smell very similar to B.O. for hours afterwards. I can vouch this is true. Just get into a bus where someone is eating one or has just ate one and you will smell what I mean.

 

A couple of days later was the last Gay Pride I went to with George. We went to Kennington Park and watched the march arrive, hoping to see the floats, but they had dropped out and parked along the road. We walked up to look at a couple of them, then stood on the corner as the march went by. Drag artist Regina Fong climbed on to something by the traffic lights with a parasol and a fan and shouted encouragement to the marchers. We then went in the park and met up with out friend Andre. I got a theatrical peck on the cheek from a gay volunteer at Amnesty International who then disappeared into the crowd. We had something to eat at the park café, avoiding the pink pound food outlets like the plague. The acts on the main stage were not very interesting, consisting mainly it seemed of ‘politically correct’ lesbians with no talent whatsoever. I think Sandy Shaw put in an appearance that year, but apart from her there was not much worth watching. We peered into the cabaret tent where Lily Savage and other drag artists appeared and saw Millie (later known as Millie Mopp) singing a song called ‘Any Queen Will Do’ which was before a well-known libel court case.

 

George remarked again on the number of lesbian couples with children in tow, which to us seemed totally inappropriate for a gay carnival. We hoped to escape the heterosexual world of families yet screaming brats were all around us. George remarked that these supposed lesbians had either opened their legs to some man in order to have kids, or, even worse, had been artificially inseminated, probably on the NHS. As he said, the world was already overpopulated without gay people making the problem worse. George felt a lot of these women were not really gay at all but just thought it ‘politically correct’ to leave their husbands and boyfriends for another woman once they had a baby.

 

At this carnival real or bogus lesbians seemed to have taken over the main stage and much of the park. Andre, George and I sat down in a quiet corner on a seat by a tree and chatted for a while. It turned out years after George died, that Andre had noticed something was wrong with George, and that he did not look at all well. Although he didn’t say it in so many words, Andre made it clear that back in June 1991 he saw George for the first time in a while and suspected he was HIV+. He said, like me, he pushed such thoughts to the back of his mind, saying he must be mistaken. But of course he wasn’t, and he was also correct about other people he told me looked ill and were HIV+ who did indeed later die of AIDS. Andre always seemed to be the first to know - he is very shrewd and little escaped his attention. Gay Pride was the last time Andre and George saw each other, but they talked for hours on the phone very regularly. I had to put Andre off when he rang up the last week before George died, telling him it was my mother who was ill. He was ringing with the latest ‘scandal’ but neither George nor myself were in any fit state to be interested.

 

From early summer George’s PCP started, and I describe the development of his terminal illness and death elsewhere. In this chapter I will concentrate on other events in the last four months of George’s life.

 

The day after Gay Pride an acquaintance of George’s from Oxfam came over to lunch with his video camera to film George’s collage. The end result pleased George immensely. The Channel Four contracting company who filmed the collage had a six person crew, tripods, arc lights and even a light on a pole outside shining through the window, but all Keith had was a hand-held video camera with a light attached, and his production was far superior. He had special lenses for close-ups and artistic effects, and was able to film every inch of George’s collage, whereas the film crew could get no close-ups, had no special effects and could only film a portion of the collage.

 

George never lived to see the unedited tape of what the TV production company filmed, but he did see the short clip they showed on the broadcast TV program, and the rest of the main collage footage was just repetition. George rightly judged Keith’s film much better and more professional. His ‘amateur’ film was an absolute masterpiece, and George loved it. George said Keith had focused on many of the most important elements and details of his collage. Filming was Keith’s hobby, and he had put a lot of effort into it and produced an extremely professional-looking film with fade-outs and fade-ins as well as the other special effects. The TV film crew, with all their paraphernalia, just did not do the collage justice. The unedited tape had good close-ups of George and myself, which were never broadcast, but their actual filming of George’s two collages was very poor indeed.

 

Keith’s film was silent, so George composed a musical soundtrack from our record collections to complement the images on the screen. I audio-dubbed it on to the video cassette, but have since discovered audio-dubbing apparently only works on the actual machine it was taped on. Since this machine has since broken and been replaced, the dubbed soundtracks of Keith’s film, the unedited ‘Out’ film and our Super-8 holiday films now transferred to video unfortunately do not come out properly when playing the videos. However, I have the original audio cassette of the songs George chose for Keith’s film, so it can be placed on a hi-fi unit simultaneously with the video to reproduce George’s original soundtrack.

 

There is one sad note to finish the story of Keith’s video, of which George was so proud and pleased. The night before he died we were watching TV, but he couldn’t get into anything. We abandoned a play set in South Africa, and put on a Pavarotti video we had not yet had time to watch, which George enjoyed immensely. When I asked if he wanted to see Keith’s video again, he said ‘yes’, but as soon as I put it on and the opening music and titles started with shots of his collage, he found it all too traumatic and screamed: ‘Turn it off, turn it off’.

 

I don’t know why. Perhaps it was too poignant a reminder of his own mortality and closeness to death, and the thought that this film would survive whereas he wouldn’t. Maybe it was knowing he could no longer keep the collage up to date, that it might deteriorate or be destroyed altogether. At any rate, he could not watch Keith’s wonderful record of his collage the night before he died. It was just too moving and close to George’s heart. Perhaps too much like the instant images of one’s whole life which flash before people during near-death experiences, for George had put so much of himself into that collage in the last few years of his life.

 

In July our friend Andre went off to Turkey for the first time on the trail of a German guy whom he thought he was in love with. They met up in Ankara I believe, and the guy made it quite plain he was sorry, but he wasn’t interested in a romantic involvement. George and I knew from what Andre had already told us that the guy had made this quite plain in a very gentle and polite way before he even left London, writing to Andre that ‘he was not his knight on a white charger’. Andre couldn’t take the hint though and followed him to Turkey.

 

So George lived to see the first of Andre’s many trips to Turkey, which led him through a series of romantic adventures and an obsession with the country and its people. Later he visited twice a year to see a Turkish guy he met on one of his holidays, so this first trip in 1991 was the beginning of some great adventures for Andre, which included some dangerous trips to the mountains in the east of the country where a civil war was going on between the government and the PKK (Kurdish separatists).

 

Also in July George went to some sort of interview with Keith, who filmed his collage, at the London Oxfam office in Battersea. If this was about a job or voluntary work nothing seemed to come of it, but this could well be because it did not have time to come to fruition before George fell ill.

 

Two days later on Saturday we went to a big Japanese festival in Battersea Park, which was very colorful and interesting. All sorts of exotic food and other things were on sale, but all I remember taking away with us were loads of free telephone note pads from Virgin Airlines’ stall, enough to last for years.

 

The following Monday was a day to remember. I had seen in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper an advert for tickets to a debate in the Houses of Parliament on Tony Benn’s proposal for a republican constitution for Britain. We received the tickets, and I arranged to meet George after work at the entrance to the Houses of Parliament. As we sat in the impressive corridor leading to the main lobby, I realized George had been drinking quite heavily. He was speaking in a louder than normal voice (usually he spoke very softly) and was making some sarcastic remarks.

 

We were eventually led, with other ticket holders, through Westminster Hall to a room overlooking Westminster Abbey. We saw some quite well known legal and political figures, and George found himself sitting next to Lord Jenkins of Putney, the former Labour Arts Minister.

 

Tony Benn led the debate, which was most interesting. When questions were invited, George felt intimidated by the fact he was unemployed and had no academic or professional qualifications. Every speaker and questioner announced themselves by their name and profession, so when George got up to speak he said ‘George Miller, researcher’, a description used by several other questioners who could well have been in exactly George’s position for all we knew.

 

When questioners sympathetic to the royal family spoke, George muttered sarcastic comments much the same as those he shouted at the TV news when he’d had a few drinks. I remember the scornful look he gave one of these questioners behind us, turning in his seat, lips pursed forward indignantly, his staring eyes looking her up and down from head to toe and back again as much as to say: ‘What the Hell kind of creature are you and who let you out?’ I thought he was about to shout out something quite over the top, but he didn’t.

 

George made a rather topical point to do with the royal family, the details of which I can’t recall, except that he got a little flustered and got a