12. LAST YEARS AT INGELOW ROAD

 

1976 started off fairly quietly. We went with a friend, Ray, to Brighton for a day in late March, and over the Easter holiday in April we visited Hampton Court, Windsor and Clacton-on-Sea. On the Tuesday following Easter we went to see Barry Humphries as Edna Everage, ‘Housewife-Superstar’.

 

Early in May we flew from Luton with Ray and another friend, Andre, to Rome for a week’s holiday. Having been twice before we were able to show them all the sights, and also visited some new to us including the catacombs, the E.U.R. development designed in the Mussolini period, and the Tivoli gardens just outside Rome, with all their fountains. We also made a return trip to Lido di Ostia, the seaside resort a short train ride from the capital.

 

There was one unpleasant incident during the holiday. We all agreed to visit a local gay cruising area in a central Rome park one evening. We split up once there, but unseen by them I overheard Ray and Andre talking about us, and it was not very flattering. I cannot remember the details, but Ray was saying cruising was not his scene and running us down, and Andre was agreeing with him. Of course I told George, and he confronted them directly for their ‘holier than thou’ attitude, though I believe he resisted the temptation to comment on Andre’s behavior on the Amsterdam trip a few months previously, when George was kept out of their hotel room whilst Andre entertained a friend. Nevertheless, Andre still turned nasty, and accused me of being George’s trained monkey, spying for him and reporting back. It did add a sour note to the holiday.

 

Arriving back in Luton, Ray’s snobbish boyfriend met us in his car. Our flight was a little late, and so he started to lecture Ray about going on ‘cheap charter flights’ and package holidays. This was obviously for our benefit, but although he and Ray had flown quite a few places together on scheduled flights, working for an airline he got either free or heavily discounted tickets. It was an unpleasant end to what would have been a pleasant holiday, had it not been for Ray’s snobbishness and Andre trying to keep in with him.

 

Eventually we lost touch with Ray altogether, when I foolishly disobeyed George’s instructions. Ray was visiting us and we were showing him some short Super-8 films of some of our holidays, when I suggested showing an explicit little gay Super-8 film we had obtained abroad. George said ‘no’, knowing Ray would be offended, but for some reason I went ahead and showed the film. Ray did not seem to react in a hostile manner, but we never heard from him again. George quite rightly accused me of losing him a friend, and said he could not understand why I had done it. I could offer no logical explanation except I knew Ray and George often went to a mutual friend’s place, and Roy sometimes showed similar films, but since he was their supplier of amphetamines at the time no doubt they felt obliged to watch them. I suppose I was just pleased with my new found toy, the movie projector, and was anxious to show it off. I should have heeded George’s warning of course, though I think we both agreed later Ray’s friendship was no great loss.

 

Andre and George remained on speaking terms till the day he died, and George even helped Andre by getting him off the game and into a proper job, where George worked. I think they were always wary of each other though, and each knew better than to cross the other one.

 

Later in May we visited Crystal Palace gardens, including the children’s zoo and the Maria Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park. We also drove down to Bognor Regis, and along the coast through Worthing to Brighton. We were getting out and about in my old van, which I had bought second-hand from our landlord, Eric, who was always tinkering with motors. I bought the van and learned to drive primarily for my disco project. That never really took off, but for a few years we became very popular taking friends on days out and giving them lifts around town. We had a couple of makeshift seats in the back of the van, but they were not very comfortable.

 

George and I very rarely ate out together at expensive restaurants, but we did occasionally. In June we went to one in Battersea which Princess Margaret reportedly frequented on occasions. From the outside it looked decidedly tatty, like a run-down greasy-spoon, but inside it was dark and atmospheric. Neither of us was at ease in such surroundings though. We hated waiters and waitresses hovering around, I did not know what to talk about so there were embarrassing silences, and we simply hated having to attract someone’s attention to ask for the bill. Tipping was also a problem we hated dealing with.

 

We had visits to Hastings and Margate in June, but looming up in July was a holiday I had planned in East Germany. It was, of course, my idea, and originally George had not planned to come with me.

 

I went ahead and booked for myself, and was due to sail from Harwich to Hamburg, then go to Berlin by train. George later changed his mind and said he would come with me, but wanted to fly direct, so I altered the booking. I never knew what brought about his decision to accompany me, but perhaps he was thinking along the lines of my mother when she decided to come with me to the Soviet Union in 1970, fearing I might defect. More probably, he wanted to see Eastern Europe for himself, and point out some of the deficiencies of the system to me, since I had once again become enthralled by Stalinism, and the G.D.R. was the ultimate ‘workers’ paradise’ to me at the time. I called it a ‘Steel Fortress of Socialism’, and considered it much more affluent and modern than the Soviet Union, and I also remembered the liberal gay scene from my previous visit in 1968, and wondered how it had developed. I took the line that it took the Germans to make Socialism work efficiently, and looked forward to paying a return visit.

 

We flew out to West Berlin, where an East German chauffeur-driven car met us. It was so unusual to see an East German-registered car on the streets of West Berlin that people stopped and stared as we went by, wondering what important personages were being driven around their half of the city in a very up-market East German limousine. The driver said very little until The Wall was spotted with the distinctive East Berlin TV tower behind it, whereupon he gestured towards it and exclaimed proudly:

 

‘D-D-R’, the German initials for the East German state.

 

We were whisked through Checkpoint Charlie with the minimum of fuss and arrived at our hotel, where other people on the package holiday had already arrived by various means of transport. We could get little information as to what was happening, and George remarked that this was the ‘couldn’t care less tour’. The courier, when he showed up, definitely had this attitude. No doubt visitors from the West who admired the German Democratic Republic enough to visit it were not very popular with ordinary East Germans.

 

We were staying in the Hotel Stadt Berlin, a modern skyscraper block in the bleak Alexanderplatz development close to the TV tower. We had a little walk around that evening, and George remarked how deserted and depressing it all looked. This was my first view of the GDR capital through a skeptic’s eyes. To me it was a bright, modern, Socialist city, but I had to admit there was a lack of life and soul as we looked out of our hotel window at the wide, almost deserted streets far below.

 

The next day, Friday, we boarded our coach for our journey southwest to Wittenberg, and the church where Martin Luther started the Reformation. It was rather strange to learn all this religious history in an officially atheist state, but the Church was very strong in East Germany, and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was one of the political parties in the Communist-led coalition which ruled the country.

 

We then drove further south for our overnight stop in Leipzig, but we saw very little of this city, as our group had opted to visit Colditz Castle, which took up most of our time. What we did see of Leipzig was extremely depressing. The huge, dirt-grimed Battle of the Nations Monument, a similarly soot-blackened railway terminus, a very early morning glimpse of St Thomas Church and the old town hall with the modern, skyscraper block of the Karl Marx University in the background. If Berlin seemed depressing, Leipzig was even worse.

 

I believe it was in Leipzig (or possibly Dresden) a woman asked us for directions to the ‘plastic park’. This was, in fact, a daring open-air exhibition of Henry Moore-type modern sculptures.

 

One woman in our group had come on the holiday especially to see a penfriend living in Leipzig, and she met her in the hotel that evening and went off to stay overnight at her home. The other people on the holiday were nearly all admirers of the ‘first Socialist State on German soil’, to use a Communist cliche. Except one, who was a fanatical supporter of Enver Hoxha’s ultra-Stalinist Albania. She was a tall, thin elderly lady with frizzy white hair and glasses, whom we nicknamed ‘Albanian Alice’. Everything we saw was unfavorably compared with a previous visit to Albania. On one occasion we were in a restaurant for our included meal, and she was asked what she would like to drink. She had decided not to spend one mark on any extras such as drinks on the holiday, and asked for water. The local water was evidently not very good for drinking and they were reluctant to give it to her, whereupon she remarked that you could have as much water as you liked in Albania. That seemed to do the trick, for a glass of water was very quickly provided for her and the reputation of GDR versus Albanian Socialism was thus saved: both could provide drinking water with lunch. Lenin would have been proud of this glorious achievement!

 

Colditz Castle, famous in Britain for its role as a P.O.W. camp in the War and the various escape attempts, was practically unknown in East Germany. It was simply a psychiatric institution outside Leipzig. Our courier seemed perplexed that we should want to be driven to see such an uninteresting place, and of course we never got to see the inside, just the external view of a rather disappointing looking building from its courtyard. Its position on a craggy hill above the town of Colditz is what made it so impregnable and difficult to escape from, otherwise it was very unremarkable.

 

Next morning we were driven southwest via Erfurt to the town of Suhl in Thuringia, where we stayed three nights in an hotel on the main square. The modern buildings around the square were decorated with flags for the ‘Free Word’ newspaper’s festival. George lost no time in commenting on the irony of the paper’s name.

 

Our hotel bedroom window looked out on the main square, where this beer festival kept us awake till the early hours. Still, we enjoyed walking round the food and beer stalls. There were also some fairground rides, and dancing on one corner of the square. We nearly got burnt passing a stall where they were grilling meat and sausages on a barbecue, as boiling oil splashed out on the pavement in front of us and caught fire. Luckily, no-one was hurt.

 

We also climbed a hill in the older part of town to a kind of fort which gave a panoramic view over the Thuringian forests. One member of our group, evidently bored by the attractions of Suhl, boarded a train to a nearby town. This was strictly illegal, as our visas listed all the towns in the GDR we were visiting, and you were not supposed to deviate from this itinerary without permission. However, no-one checked her visa, so it seemed freedom of movement within the GDR was possible for visitors.

 

On the Monday we were driven northwest to Eisenach, very near the border with West Germany. Here we saw Bach’s house, and visited the Wartburg Castle high on a hill. The East German Wartburg motorcar was made in Eisenach, and took its name from the castle.

 

We were taken round what seemed like every room of this castle by a stern-looking guide, who locked us in as he gave us facts and figures about almost every painting, statue and piece of furniture. We had experienced this practice of being locked in before, when we were taken round a church. This is one way of insuring tourists do not wander away from the guide, but it was a very uncomfortable feeling. A small child screamed with the boredom of it all, and the mother got a very hostile look from the guide. I believe the door was eventually unlocked so she and the child could escape the ordeal. Of course, George remarked to me that a country which walls in its people also feels it has to lock visitors into churches and castles to prevent them escaping.

 

We returned to Suhl for the night, and next day went north to Weimar and nearby Buchenwald. The terrible, oppressive, evil atmosphere of the place was felt even on the road to the former Nazi extermination camp. Once there we saw the various statues and memorials, and our group laid flowers on a memorial to British victims. There was also a macabre exhibition on the site, which George declined to visit. I did, and the horror of lampshades made of human skin and similar objects remain with me today.

 

One member of our group, another white-haired woman, came out of this exhibition clutching her camera, and commented to George:

 

‘It was not as good as Auschwitz’, which she had visited previously on a trip to Poland.

 

George was astounded and horrified, and replied: ‘Good?’ How could anybody use that adjective about such horrific places, unless they were pervertedly turned-on by such atrocities. From then on we categorized ‘Auschwitz Annie’ with Albanian Alice as two of the weirdos on this holiday.

 

We stayed overnight in Erfurt at the Elephant Hotel, from the balcony of which Hitler once made a speech. Inside it was quite luxurious, with a TV in our bedroom on which we were able to watch both East and West German TV. George pointed out to me how frustrating it must be for ordinary East Germans to daily see TV commercials for products not readily available to them. Western products could only be bought in hard-currency Intershops.

 

Next day we were driven east to Dresden, stopping on the way at the town of Meissen to see the famous porcelain being produced. What is known to world as ‘Dresden china’ is actually made in this town a few miles outside the city of Dresden.

 

We spent three nights in Dresden, and we were taken around the reconstructed Zwinger, which had been completely destroyed in the devastating British air raids. The city center was quite modern, and was the first place where we came across the ‘dandelion clock’ type fountains, which we later discovered in other countries.

 

In a big department store in Dresden we picked up a self-service plastic basket and started going round, but the staff were so rude and unhelpful we gave up in the end and came out without buying anything. George remarked again on the ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude prevalent everywhere in the country. It was also very noticeable that prices in the shops were sky-high for GDR-made electrical goods sold far cheaper in the West. I was shocked to see a GDR food mixer I had bought cheaply mail-order through the Communist ‘Morning Star’ newspaper in Britain priced many times what I had paid here in the country where it was made.

 

One woman in our party wandered off on her own in Dresden and got lost. We must have been due to go somewhere on the coach, because everybody was getting anxious, especially the courier. Suddenly a Vopo (Volkspolizei or People’s Policeman) roared up on his motorcycle, with the missing woman riding behind him and clutching on for grim death. She was wearing a green Vopo crash helmet emblazoned with the East German emblem, and I think was thoroughly enjoying herself pretending to be a GDR people’s policewoman.

 

On our last day in Dresden we were due to drive east to see the unusual rock formations in Saxon Switzerland, as the area is known. However, we never got that far due to lack of time (possibly due to waiting for the Vopo to deliver our lost fellow traveler). We did visit the Koenigstein Fortress with its magnificent views. Next day we visited Cecilienhof Palace where the Potsdam agreement was signed and also the Sans Souci estate. I had visited both during a visit in 1968. On this occasion, however, we noticed that the ‘Berlin Wall’ (which encircled West Berlin) cut right across the bottom of the garden of Cecilienhof, barring access to the lake beyond, which was part of West Berlin. We walked right up to the inner wire fence with the Wall just beyond it. Just at this point it looked as easy to hop over as any other garden wall, despite the sinister looking watchtower to our right. No doubt anyone attempting such an escapade would have been shot before they got very far, since the actual GDR border was always well beyond the Wall itself. Those West Berliners who painted on the Wall were in fact standing on GDR territory in order to do so.

 

We had two more nights in Berlin before flying back to London. We visited the Soviet War memorial in Treptow Park, and I took George to the nearby Kultur Park fun fair. We visited all the East Berlin sights, but what delighted us most of all was a little fountain near the Red Town Hall, the TV Tower and the Alexanderplatz complex. It was a small sculpture on a pedestal, consisting of three figures - a man with a half-closed umbrella, a man with a barrel and a peasant woman with some washing. Water trickled from the umbrella, barrel and washing. I know George thought this little fountain was the most beautiful and impressive thing in the whole of East Germany.

 

The gay scene, which I remembered so fondly from my 1968 visit, and which had proved to me that Socialism and gay liberation could go hand-in-hand, was sadly non-existent. At least we never found it. The Mocca coffee bar and nearby G (gay) bar where the scene had been so outrageously blatant eight years before had gone, or were no longer gay. All we found was the sad little City Klause Cafe, with a few depressed looking gays sitting round. Obviously there had been a clampdown since my last visit. This, as much as anything else, finally disillusioned me with the GDR in particular and Stalinist style Socialism in general.

 

We returned in style through Checkpoint Charlie in our chauffeur-driven limousine, and flew back to London. Nothing would ever be the same again, as my illusions about Communism in general and the GDR as the model, efficient, modern, Socialist, gay-liberated State had been shattered forever.

 

A few weeks later I knocked on the door of the Secretary of the local Communist Party branch. She was out, so I left all the Treasurer’s papers and books in a carrier-bag in a little cubby-hole near her dustbins with a note saying I was resigning as Treasurer. She scolded me afterwards in a furious letter, accusing me of being emotionally unstable for rejecting the Stalinist values she thought I shared with her. I apologized for leaving the local Party’s accounts in such a publicly accessible place, but explained how all my illusions were shattered and I just wanted to cut all my ties with the Party. If you do not want to go through the same experience, I wrote, then never visit a Socialist country with someone you care for who sees things as they really are and who will point out all the defects of the system to you.

 

The red-colored spectacles had finally been removed from my eyes, and I never felt drawn to Communism again. It took me a long while to sort my ideas out, before I decided I was in favor of a sort of market socialism, keeping the best of both socialist and capitalist systems. This seemed to work in Yugoslavia for a long time, but sadly nationalism has since torn that country apart. No other country has tried market socialism - China has simply adopted capitalism, which is not the same thing at all. Market socialism involves various worker cooperatives and other publicly/socially owned and controlled enterprises competing against each other, not capitalist multi-nationals moving in and dominating the market.

 

George and I grew very close politically in later years, and both of us admired the Yugoslav form of Socialism. I suppose we were both left of center in most things without being dogmatic, for we were both aware the pendulum can swing too far either way.

 

August was a fairly busy month during which we had dinner with Sheila, the ex-CND staff colleague who had hitched to East Germany with me in 1968, and we also had a meal at the trendy Toad Hall restaurant in Battersea. The menu was totally incomprehensible, consisting entirely of puns like ‘Veal Free’. You had to wait for the waitress to painstakingly translate the whole menu for you. It was a gimmick which only lasted a few years, but brought in the punters at the time.

 

We also saw several films, had a day in Hastings, and went down to stay with my mother’s friend in Somerset over the August Bank Holiday weekend. She lived in Porlock, but we drove her and my mother in the van to the nearby village of Dunster, and up Dunkery Beacon on Exmoor.

 

In September we had dinner with the snobbish Ray in the Toad Hall restaurant, and the next day Sheila and an actress friend came to us for dinner. It was our sixth anniversary of meeting.

 

Patricia, the actress, was the mother of a volunteer who used to work in CND office and bring along her little son who happily tore my invoices to pieces if no-one was looking. Pat was vegetarian, but once had to do a commercial for pork pies with another vegetarian, and they whispered to each other: ‘I hope they don’t expect us to eat the wretched things’. Regretfully, I cannot honestly say I was actually able to recognize Pat in any of her commercials - all I recall seeing was the hooded back of someone’s head which she assured me was hers.

 

Films we saw in September included Polanski’s ‘The Tenant’, ‘The Omen’, and ‘Death In Venice’. George started French evening classes on Thursdays in a local institute. He made a lot of friends there, and went on some outings with the class. He was always happy when he was speaking French.

 

Rose visited us in September and twice in October. It was a quiet month, but we saw a few films together. In November we had a Merrymaker trip to Llandudno, went to the Campaign for Homosexual Equality Fair and visited a friend’s newly-acquired council flat a stone’s throw from Oxford Street. It was in an old house, but had been beautifully refurbished, and we envied Norris such a central location, but he never seemed satisfied. He later bought the flat then moved out of London, and was unable to get all his money for his London flat out of some unscrupulous estate agents. He was featured in a TV consumers’ rights program, both Norris and the woman TV presenter knocking vainly on the manager’s door asking about the money they owed him.

 

In December we visited a friend in St Thomas’ Hospital. We worked with Steve, and he lived near us in Battersea. He died shortly afterwards from emphysema. By now we were both working at an Australian company. George had joined me at Post Office Overseas Telegrams for a while, then had got this fantastic telex job which only involved about half a day’s work for a full day’s pay. Eventually he managed to get me there too, and for many years we did alternate shifts. It was a very strange family firm, and they were reluctant to advertise any job, preferring personal recommendations.

 

They agreed to let George and me staff their telex room, even though we went on holidays together every year, rather than advertise for a telex operator. This suited us, and it was a good job even if the atmosphere was rather Victorian. The two directors were brothers and they called all the male staff by their surnames only, with no title. Many of the staff had been there for 40, 50 or 60 years, and knew nothing of the modern office. Hilda, supposedly a filing clerk, sat looking at Argos catalogs most of the day, planning new accessories for the luxurious ladies room. Meanwhile Steve and the rest of us men had to make do with a dingy basement room full of unwanted furniture when we took our tea breaks.

 

George and I had to go into the filing room each day to file the telexes, and when George went in one September day Hilda looked up from the Argos catalog with dreamy eyes and said:

 

‘Time to be thinking about Christmassy things.’

 

George could not stand Christmas at the best of times, and having to sit with this silly woman prattling on about decorations for the office before we had even taken our summer holidays was just too much. One sunny day, when the ex-Company Secretary had died and the directors and several staff members were going to the service, I met Hilda on the stairs and she smiled and whimpered:

 

‘Lovely day for a funeral.’

 

Of course she was not as silly as she sounded, for she had the managers wrapped around her little finger and could get whatever she wanted. She had been with the firm about 30 years, and at the annual ladies’ supper it is reported she sat at the head of the table like the Queen. This was a Christmas treat for the female staff members. The men, if we were lucky, got rusty cans of lager unfit for sale to the public.

 

One year a man who was very bitter at having been made redundant from quite a good job, was employed as the postal clerk. I saw him bashing a pack of cans of lager viciously on the corner of his work surface, till all the cans were dented. He was supposed to be dispatching them for customers’ Christmas orders.

 

‘That’s another lot of lager that will come back’, he said triumphantly, having assured the male staff got their liquid Christmas bonus that year. He absolutely hated the Directors, who were born in Australia but had thoroughly British accents and mannerisms. One of them asked the postal clerk to fill his fountain pen, so he soaked pieces of blotting paper in the ink before filling it, and mixed in some cold tea for good measure.

 

‘That’s the last time that old fool will ask me to fill his bloody pen for him’, he said. ‘Who do they think they are? They used to run around the Outback with a load of Abbos, with the arse hanging out of the back of their trousers.’

 

The genuine Australians, when they came over, were treated like gods. Most of the staff practically knelt down in front of them. The wife of one of these Australian directors was visiting Scotland, and rang down to the office in London for some Fortnum and Masons’ envelopes as she had run out. The receptionist obediently took down all the details and went running off to the store, then arranged for them to be posted up to Scotland. How madam managed in Australia without Fortnum and Masons’ envelopes I have no idea. Quite possibly the receptionist kept her supplied regularly.

 

Still, we were glad of the job while it lasted. The Directors were a bit stuffy, but did not treat us badly. The wages and holidays were quite generous really, and our hours were just fantastic.

 

In the last month of 1975 we paid another visit to Princess Margaret’s favorite Battersea restaurant, and again we saw Dorothy Squires, this time at the Wimbledon Theatre. It was just over a year since we last saw her, and my critical remarks sparked off a crisis in our relationship. This time I believe I did enjoy the show more. Certainly we had drawn closer together in the past twelve months, and had been out together many times. I had also now left the Communist Party, and was not out at meetings every other week.

 

It was on a Saturday in December we did our first gay disco together at one of the Porchester Hall drag balls. This was the time Rose, Lena, Freda and myself all got photographed for a magazine whilst poor George was stuck on stage playing records.

 

We spent Christmas together with Rose and Neil in Hastings, and visited my mother two days afterwards. The next year was to be the last in our first flat together.

 

We started 1977 off with a Sunday cinema visit to see Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham in ‘Smashing Time’, a comedy about the swinging 60s. Later in January we did a disco in Hackney. It was a Communist Party gig booked before I left the Party, but we did it anyway. After playing Brenda Lee’s ‘Let’s Jump The Broomstick’ a woman later came up to us and in a jolly middle-class accent requested ‘the one about the bean-pole’.

 

The first Sunday in February we went together to see one of George’s favorite actresses in one of his all-time favorite films: Maggie Smith in ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.’ He later did a sketch which I still have on video in which he played the part of Miss Jean Brodie giving ‘her gels’ a sex education lesson in his best, refined Edinburgh accent. (George had lost his Scottish accent years before he met me. His native Glaswegian accent is quite different from that of Edinburgh.)

 

We again saw Lindsay Kemp’s company perform ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’, this time at the Round House, Chalk Farm. In March we saw the same company perform ‘Salome’. I cannot now recall for sure, but probably Jack (The Great Orlando) from that company came along to a party thrown by our actress friend Pat in her Soho flat in late February. She had three cats, all with very posh names. At one party everyone was sitting around in her main room overlooking Walker’s Court and the Raymond Revue Bar. In the middle of the room was a cat-litter tray. One of the cats came over and made very smelly use of it in full view of all the guests, and Pat simply smiled and said: ‘Oh look everybody, how sweet. Clarissa’s using her tray.’

 

I didn't see this particular feline cabaret as I had been to a Jerry Lee Lewis show and arrived at the party late, but George told me what I had missed.

 

We did a disco in February for the wedding of a work colleague of my mother’s. We played a mixture of rock’n’roll, 60s and 70s pop music and Country’n’Western. I started to play Hank Snow’s ‘Nobody’s Child’ but George told me to take it off quickly. I had completely forgotten the bride was blind, and the song I had been about to play is a Country weepie about a blind orphan nobody wants to adopt. Fortunately we stopped the record during the intro before anyone realized my awful mistake.

 

At Easter we had a short trip up to Glasgow to visit George’s relatives, and again saw ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ when we returned, on Bank Holiday Monday.

 

Later that month (April) we flew off for a week in Malta, staying at Balluta Bay near Sliema, a suburb of Valetta. It was good weather and we enjoyed our holiday, traveling all over the island and also visiting neighboring Gozo. Malta is very dry with not much greenery, and only one decent sandy beach. Golden Bay was a bus ride away at an isolated corner miles from Valetta, near an army firing range. We had a nice day there, but otherwise used the more rocky beaches. We also visited the ‘Silent City’ of Mdina, and ancient ruins on Gozo.

 

We came back with plenty of pictures of cacti and palm trees, which all looked very exotic. We were in Valetta on May 1st for the ruling Labour Party’s May Day parade. There were some colorful floats made entirely of flowers, though it was more on the scale of Battersea’s Easter Parade than the Red Square parade in Moscow.

 

We discovered two new confectionaries in Malta: an orange-flavored bar of chocolate, and Dr Pepper, the popular American soda then unknown in the UK.

 

Malta is a strong Catholic country, and all the buses had little shrines in the front above the driver, alongside the girlie pin-ups. We were walking along a street in Old Valetta’s red light district, and the girls were so desperate to get a client they literally grabbed hold of George’s arm and tried to drag him away from me and into a dive. George had to pull away quite violently, but such forceful tactics were not usually necessary. When approached by a prostitute near the Pigalle in Paris it was sufficient for George to say in French:

 

‘I’m looking for a man’

 

Whereupon the girl got the message and replied: ‘Moi aussi’ ('Me also').

 

This was to be my year of visiting Mediterranean islands, for shortly before visiting Malta and Gozo, my Dad had invited me to pay my first visit to Cyprus at his expense later in the year.

 

Early that summer we visited Margate, Brighton, Great Yarmouth and Hastings, and George had a day out at Hampton Court with his French evening class.

 

The weekend we spent at Hastings was mainly to get away from the Silver Jubilee celebrations. They had decorated our Victorian street with flags, but fortunately nobody had asked to attach any of this bunting to our house. Both we and our landlord were anti-royalist. Ours was one of the few houses in the street without any patriotic red, white and blue decorations in the windows. They were threatening to hold a children’s street party on the Saturday, and this was just too much - if there was anything we hated more than jingoism and poncing royals, it was spoilt, screaming brats. We jumped in my old van and we were off to see Rose and Neil on the Sussex coast, leaving the sprogs to take over our street for the day.

 

In August George’s sister Margaret arrived at Victoria coach station with her little daughter, ‘Wee’ Margaret. His sister had recently been widowed when her husband, George, died suddenly from a heart attack. We had a funny relationship with him - sometimes he seemed hostile and hardly spoke a word, but the last time we saw him when visiting Glasgow he had been very friendly towards us, chatting away and joking.

 

We drove the two Margarets down to Windsor and visited the safari park, and also took them around London - Carnaby Street, The Tower and all the usual tourist sights. They loved the free children’s zoo in Battersea Park, near where we lived.

 

The following week we went up to Glasgow for Margaret’s son John’s wedding. After my own George’s funeral, Margaret told her sister Betty that she never realized George was gay, but I find this very hard to believe. Certainly John seemed to know, for he told George he would not think of inviting him to his wedding without me.

 

There was no respite in August, for the following weekend we were off again, to my mother’s friend Cath in Somerset.

 

We drove back from Porlock by way of Stonehenge, visiting the ancient monument before driving on to London, dropping my mother off at her flat.

 

From George’s diary notes it seems we were planning a party for our anniversary on September 10th, but in the event we went to see the stage performance of ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ at the King’s Road Theatre (later turned into a multi-screen cinema). This was one of our favorite all-time shows, and we both liked all the numbers in it. We could not have celebrated our 7th anniversary in a better way.

 

A week later I flew off to Cyprus with my dad, and met many of my relations for the first time, including my paternal grandmother. My brother, Philip, had met her and my grandfather during a visit in 1966, but on that occasion I had already booked to go to the USSR on my very first trip abroad, so had to forego Cyprus.

 

My grandfather had since died, but my grandmother was so pleased to see me, having kept photos of me as a baby which my mother had sent her. I did not speak any Greek, and she no English, but it was an emotional meeting. I could not speak either with my Uncle Costas or many other relations. I enjoyed seeing them gather the grape harvest, and even lent a hand while someone took a photo for my album.

 

The weather was very hot, but I think I only got three hours on the beach during my two week stay. Part of the time was spent in my dad’s flat in Nicosia. (Stifling hot - it was 97 degrees outside and well over 100 inside. I had to soak my pajamas in cold water several times a night in order to sleep - an hour later they were bone dry again.)

 

I visited the Turkish part of Nicosia, but when in my dad’s flat on the Greek side I tried to watch Pat Coombes in a British TV show on Turkish TV my father went mad - no-one ever watches the Turkish channel in the Greek part of Cyprus. For this reason my dad did not realize the other part of the island, about a mile away, was an hour ahead. I was able to report back on other things too, such as shop prices. My father was furious to learn that the Turkish lira had replaced the Cypriot pound, and even more irate when he discovered prices over there were much cheaper than on the Greek side.

 

I was very sympathetic to the Turkish Cypriots, and talked with several of them, even shaking hands with two Turkish solders. I believe Turkish Cypriots would have been massacred in an orgy of ethnic cleansing if the Greek colonels’ coup against Makarios had succeeded, and if Cyprus had become united with Greece, as the right-wing coup leader, Nicos Sampson, wanted. I also believe there is strong circumstantial evidence of a NATO plot to divide the island, for Britain, supposedly a guarantor of Cypriot independence, had thousands of troops permanently based on the island yet did nothing when the Greek colonels overthrew the Cypriot government in order to further Enosis (union with Greece), and remained inactive when Turkish troops intervened to protect their ethnic population. The fact that the Turks stopped at the Green Line running neatly through Nicosia and the Greeks did not put up much of a fight (Greece sent no troops to the island to protect their coup from the predictable Turkish military intervention), whilst Britain and the USA remained inactive, suggests it would have suited NATO very well if Makarios had been killed as planned by the coup leaders, and if Enosis and the Turkish invasion of the North resulted in the Greek/Turkish border running right through the island of Cyprus. Makarios was seen as too pro-Soviet, and there was always the danger he would allow the Soviets to establish a naval base there, which would have been their first in the Mediterranean. Britain had long made plans to split the island, their ‘solution’ to the Irish problem in the 1920s. In the event the Cypriot coup was botched, Makarios survived, and the messy division of the island has continued for over thirty years, with the Turks taking all the blame for a situation largely caused by the Greek colonels and their right-wing allies in Cyprus, and by the total failure of Britain to fulfil its role as guarantor of Cypriot independence. Turkey became the scapegoat, when all it did was act to protect Turkish Cypriots in a post-coup fascist Cyprus about to become a province of fascist Greece. (Decades later in a referendum prior to the Greek Republic of Cyprus joining the European Union, Turkish-Cypriots voted to reunify the island, and Greek-Cypriots rejected this plan. So now the Greek-Cypriots are solely to blame for the continued division of the island, which happens to suit them very well.)

 

My dad maintained the Turkish-Cypriots were prisoners behind the Nicosia version of the Berlin Wall, and that the Greek-Cypriots would welcome them with open arms, but that the Turkish soldiers shot them if they tried to escape. However, he could not explain why virtually the entire Turkish population of Cyprus, spread throughout the island before the coup and subsequent Turkish intervention (as were the Greek-Cypriots) somehow found themselves imprisoned in the North. Of course, the deserted Turkish quarters in all towns and cities on the Greek side told their own story - both populations had been ethnically cleansed and forced to flee to their respective zones. The Greek exodus in the North was forced by the invading Turkish army, but the Turkish exodus in the South must have come about because of the hostility of the local Greek-Cypriot population. The two communities have a lot in common, and an almost indistinguishable way of life. Religion, nationality and language divide them. Hopefully a mutually acceptable federal solution can be accomplished before long, or else the only solution is for the Greek-Cypriots to have their Enosis and let the North become integrated with Turkey. Ultimately, the European Union may be the best hope for Cyprus, the former Yugoslav and Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, keeping nationalism in check and reducing the significance of borders to that of mere provincial boundaries. (At present, due to the Greek-Cypriot's perverse rejection of the Annan plan to reunify Cyprus, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus remains outside the EU.) 

When not in Nicosia, I stayed with friends of my father’s in his village near Paphos. I saw the house where he was born, where my aunt and uncle now lived. They had lived in London for years and my aunt was not at that time happy to be back in the primitive conditions of a Cypriot village.

 

‘In Kilburn, if I want a chicken for lunch I go to Sainsbury’s’, she told me, ‘but here I have to catch chicken first.’

 

Everything in the village was very picturesque and traditional. The workers went to the fields on donkeys, though they all had cars, fridges and TVs. Cyprus is a very fertile and rich country, and since everyone in the countryside seems to own their house and a sizeable portion of land, they live very cheaply from produce they grow themselves.

 

My father was moaning about how much money and land the Church has, and seemed to think they should use it to compensate people like him who had lost land in the North. In the village, however, he had donated a church hall to impress the villagers, despite being an atheist at heart.

 

During this trip I got to know my father better, and psychoanalyzed him. He seemed to have spent his life trying to make money in order to buy ‘friends’. I found it all rather sad, as he was basically a lonely man. Certainly his own family never saw much of his money - it was boys from the village who were sent to be educated in England, but my brother and I, his own sons, never got a penny from him towards our education. My mother had to struggle to send my brother to university, and I never even got the opportunity.

 

I was staying with friends and neighbors of my father in his village of Kallepia. My eyes lit up and my heart jumped when he introduced me to Andreas, a handsome 18 year old just out of the army (the Greek Cypriot National Guard). I was to share a bedroom with him. Alas, although I tried to tell Andreas I was gay and to get his interest by wanking like mad when I was in a single bed a few feet from his, he simply fell straight asleep every night, and there was no hanky panky at all, despite all the rumors about Greeks. George said the poor lad was probably deadbeat from working in the fields all day. Certainly Cyprus is one of the most homophobic societies in the world. My dad said a neighbor in the village who decided he was gay was forced to marry a girl, and they now had a family and he was reportedly ‘cured’. Gay bars hardly exist at all, and if they do are strictly for tourists. Even on a visit in the mid 1990s with two gay friends we found the Cyprus gay scene one of the worst in Europe. The sole supposedly ‘gay’ bar in Paphos in the mid-1990s was frequented mainly by heterosexuals with a sprinkling of frightened looking gays. The barman flirted and chatted us up for a week to insure we kept coming back and spending money, then announced on our last day, when he knew we were going home, that he lived with his girlfriend.  In 1977 I did manage to have a bit of fun in Nicosia, but the gay scene was all very furtive, and the cruising ground around the city walls either closed or brightly lit at night on subsequent visits. A park a bit further away took over in the mid-1990s, but the gay men cruising were scared of their own shadows, and scuttled away at the slightest noise. Homosexuality is illegal in Cyprus, although they are having to change this in order to join the EU. Gays are strongly disapproved of by the Church and the population generally, since it goes totally against Greek-Cypriot culture. In the countryside you cannot even get a home unless you marry. It comes with a wife as a dowry in an arranged marriage, and the top story is built first. The parents of either the husband or the wife move into the ground floor level when they get too old to live on their own. Everyone has to do this - marry, have children and look after their parents. No room in such a culture for gays unless they conform and then look for extra-marital gay encounters in the few sad cottages and cruising grounds on the island.

 

Although I had no luck with bedding Andreas, he and his family treated me well and showed me around the area. My father took me to a Greek-Cypriot wedding, saying it was a ‘cousin’ getting married. Without further explanation he pushed me through a door into the church, whilst he went through another entrance. I thought it was great as I had a splendid view of the ceremony from the side of the altar. Then a man turned round and said something to me in Greek. When I did not respond, he spoke in English to demand five Cypriot pounds. My dad had not warned me I was one of the many ‘best men’ and would be expected to contribute, but luckily I had some money on me. We then followed the couple out of the church, through the village to their house. A mattress was brought out and placed in the street. ‘What next?’ I thought, fully expecting the couple to consummate their marriage then and there in full view of the village. In actual fact, as always with Greek-Cypriots, there was a mercenary motive, for half an hour later the mattress was covered in currency notes and checks, whereupon it was carried back in again.

 

My dad took me to the beach only once or twice during my entire stay. I was furious at being stuck in a scrapyard in Limassol (which has excellent beaches) sweltering in 100 degree heat all day while he went off ‘to do some business’. Of course, without transport I was trapped - there was no public transport from my dad’s village to the coast. I had to rely on Andreas or my dad to give me a lift. On a later visit my dad lent me his car, which made all the difference.

 

Whilst in Cyprus I wrote two letters to George, which he kept. They were chatty letters about the holiday. In the first one I wrote about a visit to a village restaurant soon after we arrived on the island, with dancing to a band:

 

‘Oh George, you’d really like it here - we must come here together. The people were all so happy in the restaurant, even the young ones did the traditional Greek dancing, not this modern stuff. Dad says people come from Nicosia for a night out at this restaurant. Such a change to see the locals enjoying themselves, and not be among tourists being taken for a ride. These Cypriots are a camp lot though - two pairs of men were dancing together, so we’d be OK here.’

 

Of course, this had nothing to do with overt homosexuality, just local custom. My first impressions were very misleading as to the real plight of gays in Cyprus. I enthuse in my letter about my dad’s posh flat in Nicosia and its expensive furniture (‘his London flat... is a slum compared to this one’). He had given me the key and said I, my mum and my friends could use it any time he was not there himself, but George and I never went to Cyprus together. It just did not really appeal to him.

 

I wrote about visiting some refugees from the North, who in three years had acquired a nice bungalow with marble flooring, a TV, record player and all modern furniture to go with the car in which they escaped. TV in Cyprus at that time was black and white with one channel only (no-one but me would dream of watching the forbidden Turkish channel).

 

In the letter I then repeat the pack of lies which my dad told me about Turkish-Cypriots being shot by their own soldiers trying to escape to the Greek zone, where everything was cheaper, according to my father. Of course, this proved to be untrue as I found out when I visited the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus, as it was then known. I did end my paragraph full of my dad’s lies with the caution: ‘How much of this is true, of course, I don’t know.’

 

I promised to try to ring George, but said I had been unsuccessful so far as the phone in the Nicosia flat was not working. I ended my first letter:

 

‘I miss you very much, George. I’d enjoy this holiday much more if you were here with me. Do take care of yourself - I’ll ring you if I possibly can. I look forward to coming back home on Friday week. I’ll certainly be in touch with you by post or phone before then.’

 

I ended with a P.S. about opening the balcony doors because it was so hot trying to sleep in my dad’s flat, but ‘two horrible black things - must be bats - flapped away from the building, so I closed door again quickly. I’ve opened window and pulled Venetian blind down.’

 

In the second letter I wrote about meeting my grandmother for the first time: ‘It was so overwhelming emotionally I wanted to cry. The poor old woman kept hugging and kissing me and asking how my leg is now. She has a picture of me as a baby on her wall, and was in tears because she lost a picture of Mum and Philip. So I gave her two photos, one of Mum and one of me, Philip and Mum. She kept kissing Mum’s photo and saying ‘‘O Dorothea, Dorothea’‘ and she told Dad off for not bringing her with us. I told her I’d bring her, but she said she may be dead by then.’ This proved true, for the old lady died a few months after my visit, so she and my mother never met. The remark about my leg was prompted by letters sent to her by my mother when I was a baby, describing operations for a club-foot and the resulting complications.

 

I then relate Dad’s version of their married life together and the reasons I was not taught Greek, and what led to the split. He blamed much of it on relations, particularly my maternal grandmother and my dad’s brother and sister-in-law. ‘Dad says he was driven to drinking and gambling, and says my mum was psychologically ill and a religious maniac.’ I seem to see his point in the letter, and go on to describe how my mother asked him to refuse to serve two women in his restaurant because they were wearing fur coats and she thought they must therefore be prostitutes. Since my mother owned a fur coat herself, my father’s version of this incident may not be strictly accurate, though George would have remarked: ‘We are all prostitutes - including a wife who gets her husband to buy her a fur coat.’ I write about how my maternal grandmother made my mother paranoid, and I know my mum now agrees her mother did have undue influence over her. In the letter I report my dad’s version when: ‘On one occasion he tried to teach me a few Greek words Mum went hysterical and screamed: ‘‘Don’t talk to him in that bloody language’‘.’ I also report his claim never to have planned keeping my brother and me in Cyprus as children, but say: ‘I suppose I shall never know the whole truth, but certainly my dad was not solely to blame. I understand him much better now, and think we are much closer.’

 

This closeness did not last long, though I certainly think I got to understand him better. The main cause of the marriage breakdown was, of course, the culture clash. In rural Cyprus women are merely chattels and servants, and the men sit around all day and do little but sip coffee and play backgammon whilst the women work. My mother was not prepared for that kind of life, and my father could not understand why.

 

I wrote a little insight into why most Cypriot homes are modern, why everyone seems to own their house, and why even gays marry: ‘Most houses here are modern because every daughter is built a new home by her parents for when she marries. When old people die their house is pulled down.’

 

After describing enormous tomatoes and huge pork chops, I quote my Dad reciting a Cypriot proverb:

 

‘If you find food eat, if you find work run away.’

 

I then close saying how much I miss George and wish he were with me. It is, I believe, the last letter from me which he kept. It may even be the last letter I wrote him, although we did go on some more separate holidays. I certainly phoned him and sent postcards, but cannot remember if I ever wrote him another letter before he died 14 years later.

 

In October George and I went to see the very funny play ‘Once A Catholic’, and again saw Dorothy Squires at the London Palladium in November. We visited his Uncle Robert in Portsmouth at the end of that month. He was George’s last surviving close relative of his parents’ generation, and we visited him and his partner Marie several times.

 

In December we saw the musical ‘Elvis’ at the Astoria Theatre, a show which featured Shakin’ Stevens and two other Elvis impersonators (Timothy Whitnal and P. J. Proby, or was that another production of the show?) to represent different stages of his career. The following day we again saw Dorothy Squires, this time at the London Pavilion according to George’s diary

 

Christmas Day we spent at my mother’s place, then went down to Rose and Neil in Hastings on Boxing Day and stayed two nights.

 

We had a New Year’s Eve party, the last in our first home together. A lot of our friends came, including Freda in full glamorous theatrical drag. Just as we were in the middle of preparations on New Year’s Eve I got a phone call from my dad in Cyprus to say that Andreas, the boy from his village with whom I shared a bedroom  in September, was on a flight to Heathrow, and could I meet him and take him to my father’s flat in Hampstead.

 

Typically of my dad this came straight out of the blue with no warning whatsoever, so after a hurried discussion with George, it was decided I would dash off in the van, meet Andreas and bring him back to the party, and take him to my father’s flat later that night or the next day.

 

I believe I greeted the first guests, and then drove to Heathrow to collect Andreas. The boy had never been abroad before, and certainly had never seen a big city like London. All he really knew was primitive village life in rural Cyprus. Imagine the culture shock on arrival at Heathrow and being driven down the motorway to a gay party in suburban London.

 

Andreas was bewildered at all these strange English people packed into our flat. Which were men and which were women? It was so hard to tell. He looked at Freda, and I explained it was a man dressed as a woman, then he looked at our actress friend Pat, and I assured him she was a real woman. He then looked back at Freda and queried: ‘Man dressed as woman?’

 

Of course all the bitches at the party were just drooling over this gorgeous young Greek god who had just walked into their midst, and we had to keep explaining he was not gay (despite the myths about Greeks) and had just arrived from a village in Cyprus. I was probably the only out gay person he had ever met prior to leaving Cyprus, and he had certainly never seen a drag queen before.

 

He had a few drinks and seemed to be enjoying himself, but eventually it was all too much for him and he asked me to take him to my dad’s flat. So I had to leave the party and drive him across London. I forgot about it being the early hours of New Year’s Day, and drove up The Mall and through Trafalgar Square, where people were swarming all over the road wearing funny hats, blowing hooters, twirling football rattles, and banging on cars.

 

One guy staggered up to us and thumped on the van shouting: ‘Happy New Year.’ From the look on Andreas’ face he clearly thought all the English were raving mad, and must have wondered how he would survive in this strange new world where men dressed as women and people walked around all night in a drunken stupor making a noise and stopping traffic. My father’s empty flat in Hampstead must have seemed like a haven of sanity to him as I dropped him off, quickly showed him where everything was and dashed back to the party.

 

We started off the year 1978 by seeing a number of plays and shows together: ‘The Plough and the Stars’ and ‘Half-Life’ at the National Theatre, ‘Privates on Parade’ at the Piccadilly Theatre, and Ingrid Bergman and Wendy Hiller in ‘Waters of the Moon’ at the Haymarket Theatre, and we were only half-way through February.

 

An acquaintance of George’s (I would not use the word friend) wanted us to move his few sticks of furniture from his West London room to his mother’s house in East Anglia, where he was going to live. George thought he was only after his mother’s house and money, and I have no reason to doubt his judgment.

 

This person was very vain and talked non-stop about himself all the way down in my van. He used to go ‘on the game’ in drag, and he told us how he crossed himself every time he passed a Catholic church because God had been so good to him. He said he would treat us to a meal for helping to move his stuff, and instructed us to stop at a hamburger joint with waitress service. He then humiliated the waitress, telling her he knew her boss personally (it was a large chain) and realized how poorly his staff were paid, but not to worry as he would give her a big tip. I think he left her 10 pence.

 

We got to the town and met his mother, a frail old lady. We were horrified when he told her to go upstairs to bed. He had shown us her bedroom, and it was up a steep, dangerously winding staircase. George was convinced he hoped his mother would fall and break her neck. His praises of her were over-the-top - about how he thanked God every day for such a wonderful mother and hoped nothing happened to her.