At My Mother's Knee (41 page)

'Got a light on you, girl?' Penny was at my side and waving
a Park Drive in my face.

'I'm not a girl,' I said firmly, in spite of the fact that I was
terrified of him.

'Fuckin' hell, listen to the gob on this one, Frances. Looks
like Julie Andrews, sounds like Lee Marvin,' Penny hissed.
'Don't throw your dolly out the pram, la. Well, have you got a
light or not?'

I lit his cigarette for him, cursing Steve for taking so long
getting back.

'Thanks,' Penny said, taking a hefty drag of his ciggie before
passing it on for Frances to get a light from. 'I'd offer you one
but we've only got five between usss. We haven't got a fuckin'
bean so we're on the lookout for a mush to get a few bevvies
out of. Looksss like I've scored,' he said, nodding towards the
'mush', who was returning from the bar and trying to work
out how he'd just been conned into buying two halves of lager
for two characters he didn't even know.

'What's a mush?' I asked Steve when he eventually returned,
complaining that it took ages to get served when in reality I'd
seen him chatting up a bit of rough by the bar.

'Who's been telling you about mushers?' he asked, blowing
the head off his pint.

I nodded towards Penny.

'You want to keep away from the likes of that,' he said,
looking at Penny as if he'd just crawled out from underneath a
lavatory tile, 'and keep away from mushers. They're dirty old
men who get conned into buying drinks on the strength of an
empty promise – and just in case you've got any ideas, the next
round's yours.'

We moved on,
first
to the
Masquerade Club
, a tiny little
place off Dale Street in Hockernall Alley, an address straight
out of Harry Potter, as were the few desperate-looking inhabitants
of the club, and then on to the place I most wanted
to visit, the Bear's Paw. The majority of Liverpool's gay clubs
were hidden down small alleys and the Bear's Paw, in Dorans
Lane off North John Street, was no exception. Steve knew the
owner of the club,
Gordon Shearer
(known as Norma to some
of the older customers, but never to his face), and his business partner,
Dennis
.

Steve rang the bell and, after close scrutiny through a small
metal grill in the door, a tough young ex-squaddie (rumoured
to be – probably out of jealousy – Gordon's rent boy) allowed
us in. He ushered us down a flight of stairs to where Dennis,
sat behind a small desk, greeted us and took the twenty-pence
entrance fee.

'Hello, darling,' he said, offering his cheek for Steve to kiss.
He was a fussy little thing, dressed in a neat black suit, a pair
of large black horn-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose
and the remaining strands of his dark hair Brylcreemed and
combed artfully over his balding pate. He could've passed for
one of the court ushers or even a magistrate if it wasn't for his
camp manner and the startling array of diamond rings and
gold sovereigns that adorned his long slender fingers. 'And
who's this then?' he asked Steve, offering me his hand in the
manner of Queen Victoria. I nervously introduced myself, not
knowing if I should shake his hand or kiss it, settling for a
gentle squeeze. His hand was warm and clammy.

'Listen to that voice,' he said, throwing his hands up in
surprise. 'Sweet little face like that and the voice of a docker.'

I wasn't too happy at being called sweet and made a mental
note to toughen up my image, maybe go back to having my
hair cropped short instead of the bouffant mop of shoulderlength
curls that I was sporting now. The club was split into
two: upstairs there was a dance floor and a bar, while downstairs
was an unintentional temple to kitsch. Gordon and
Dennis firmly believed that the brass jugs and chipped plates
that adorned the flock-covered walls, the beaded curtain that
hung from the bar and trailed in everyone's drinks, the Swiss
murals in the alcoves and the large jolly lady with brassy gold
ringlets who nodded her head and smiled indulgently as she
ran her fingers over a Hammond organ added a touch of
sophistication. The Bear's Paw attracted the 'better type
of queen' according to Dennis; the rougher sort were not
encouraged and went to Sadie's in Wood Street instead.

I left Steve talking to Gordon at the bar and shot upstairs to
investigate the disco. I couldn't believe it – men, grown men, of
all shapes and ages, blatantly dancing together, arms entwined
around each other's bodies, heads resting on shoulders. There
was even a couple openly necking on the dance floor. Oh, this
was too much to take in! Men dancing together didn't seem
right somehow. I sat down, unable to believe my eyes. My
mother would drop dead on the spot if she saw this lot.

There was an unwritten law in the Bear's Paw that I was as
yet ignorant of: it stated that if somebody offered to buy you a
drink and you accepted, it went without saying that you had
just agreed to sleep with them. I accepted four drinks that
night, had quite a few dances and had a bit of explaining to do
when Steve came up to collect me. A particularly terrifying old
queen in a white polo-neck sweater, known among the patrons
as 'the Glider' after the strange way he glided around the dance
floor, pausing to strike a pose every now and then, accosted me on my way down the stairs. He'd bought me a drink earlier
and it was payback time.

''Scuse me,' it hissed, 'I thought I was having you tonight.'

'It'll take more than a half of cider to get me to go to bed
with you,' I muttered, pushing past him and making a hasty
exit.

'What would it take then, rent boy?' he shouted after me.
'Ten shillings?'

'No, a friggin' general anaesthetic.'

I was learning fast.

'L
IBERALS TO TAKE OVER LIVERPOOL,' MY DAD SAID, REPEATING
what he'd just heard on the radio, with more than a hint
of disgust in his voice. 'First
Ted Heath
and now that
Jeremy Thorpe
, a right pair of bloody clowns, God help us.'

I ignored him. We weren't getting on very well lately. He
annoyed me for no other reason than that he was my father and
I was an angry teenager looking for a victim to be angry with.

'Where are you off to?' he said, watching me disapprovingly
as I combed my hair in the mirror.

'Me mate's,' I answered irritably. 'We're going to a club in
Liverpool so I'll probably stay at his,' adding grudgingly, 'if
that's OK.'

'You spend a lot of time staying with "mates",' he said
suspiciously, looking at me over his glasses. 'Who are all these
"mates"?' He didn't like me staying out and worried – justifiably
– that I might be up to no good.

Tonight's mate in question was
Diane
, a girl I'd met at work
in the court collecting office. She was nine years older than me
and a bit of a party animal. I kept my gay side from her at first,
reluctant to come out to her, though things might have turned
out less complicated later on if I'd been honest about my
sexuality in the first place. The fact was I was unsure of what
my true sexuality was, still experimenting with both sexes, unable to make up my mind which bus to get on. I was sure of
one thing: bisexuality made life very awkward at times.

Diane
introduced me to Liverpool's
club scene. The Babaloo
,
Ugly's
, the Mardi Gras, these were trendy places to be seen in;
the one to avoid was the
She Club
, which had a reputation for
being popular with dog-rough man-hungry divorcees. It was
said that in the She, along with the
Grafton
, the women bought
the men the drinks. I became very close to Diane and it was
inevitable that we ended up sleeping with each other.

I was no stranger to the Bear's Paw by now. The shy young
man who was shocked at the sight of two men dancing
together had all but vanished, though I was still contemptuous
of the young, screamingly camp queens who referred to each
other as 'she'. I had learned to give the more malevolent
entities and predatory letches a wide berth, and along the way
I had managed to make quite a few friends.

My new best pal was
Tony
. Tony and I hit it off after a prolonged
bitching session one night, though we were like chalk
and cheese. He enjoyed a bit of verbal sparring and I'd had the
best tutors when it came to that. He took me under his wing.
He lived in
Gayton
, an area considered very posh in our house,
and was two years older than me in age but wise beyond his
years in experience. He was small, dark and handsome, wellspoken,
intelligent, charming, didn't smoke and had an
excellent job as a Customs officer. My mother adored him. He
was everything I wasn't and she encouraged our
friendship
,
hoping that his influence would rub off on me.

What she didn't know was that among his other attributes
was an evil tongue, a wicked sense of humour and a voracious
appetite for sex. He also had the biggest penis on Merseyside,
not that we were lovers – ours was a strictly platonic relationship,
sisters out on the prowl together – but he was
inordinately proud of his enormous member and quite
unabashed when it came to whopping it out, a trick that made him very popular. Tony had no inhibitions and it was him who
taught me not to be so uptight and that, if you played your
cards right, being gay could mean having a lot of fun.

'Let me be your fairy godmother,' he said in his best
Mae West
, a film star whose attitude to
life
and men he greatly
admired. 'I'll show you a good time, kid.'

He was as good as his word. His current squeeze had something
to do with the New Southport
Theatre
; Marlene Dietrich
was appearing there and Tony asked me if I'd like to go. 'Call
it an early birthday present,' he'd said. I'd been interested in
Marlene ever since I first saw her on the telly singing 'Black
Market' in the Billy Wilder film
A Foreign Affair
(one of her
finest if you want my opinion, but let's not get into a queeny
discussion over the films of Marlene Dietrich right now and get
on with the plot). She fascinated me; she was different from
anybody else I'd ever seen. Aunty Chris had a bit of a look of
her and there was an air, reminiscent of Marlene, in the way
she handled her cigarette, but the real McCoy was something
special – unbelievably glamorous and undefeated even though
she ended up getting shot or arrested in most of her films. I
jumped at the chance to go and see this mythical creature in the
flesh, incongruous as the prospect seemed of glimpsing this
ethereal goddess of the silver screen in somewhere like
Southport. A Parisian whorehouse, a Wild West saloon, yes,
but respectable old Southport?

Apart from a few school trips, of which a matinee of
School
for Scandal
is the only one that sticks in my mind, a performance
of
Abelard and Heloise
memorable only for a naked
Diana Rigg and
Keith Michell
, two pantos, the Little Theatre's
production of
The Lion in Winter
and a Gang Show, the only
other time I'd been near a theatre was when my mother threw
herself on the bonnet of
Johnnie Ray's
car outside the Empire.
I was about six and my mother couldn't afford the ticket, and
even if she had, there was no one she knew to go with, so she'd ambled across the water with me in tow, telling my dad she
was 'going to look at a nice little church'. She adored Johnnie
Ray; her eyes filled with tears whenever she heard him on the
radio. 'Poor Johnnie,' she'd say, smiling sadly at the transistor
radio, lost in her dreams. 'God love him.'

I don't know if she ended up sprawled across his windscreen
by design or by accident. I like to think that she lost her
balance as she stepped forward in her eagerness to catch a
glimpse of her idol as he drove past. She slid from the bonnet
to the road without so much as a momentary glance out of the
window from her hero. The car drove off smartish, leaving her,
with her stockings laddered and knees bloodied, sat on the
road outside the stage door of the Empire and feeling very
foolish. 'Don't tell your dad,' she said, bribing me with a box
of Poppets from the machine on the platform as we waited for
the train to take us back to Birkenhead.

The
New Southport Theatre
was undergoing a refurbishment
and was only half finished. It smelt of newly laid carpet
and fresh paint on Marlene's opening night and the brightly lit
foyer was teeming with people, mainly men, waiting to
worship at the feet of their idol. I was introduced to the Lord
Mayor and given a glass of champagne, and thought I'd really
arrived. Tony, I noticed, was
dressed
soberly in a smart grey
suit with a shirt and tie. I secretly thought that his dress sense
was a bit square and was glad I'd 'put the dog on': scarlet
corduroy fitted jacket, pink shirt with batwing collar,
brown flares and bright red two-inch platform boots,
all of which clashed beautifully with my flame-red, hennaed
hair.

Marlene wasn't what I'd expected her to be. She'd grown old
since
Foreign Affair
, and although still beautiful, it was a
beauty that was artificial. She seemed frail buried underneath
that big white coat, her eyes tired and empty as they peered out
from under an unnatural-looking wave of blonde hair into the gloom of the auditorium. She seemed very nervous and unsure
of what to do as she sang her opening song. She kept shuffling
around and staring into the wings, a little old lady, vague and
confused and caught in the spotlight of an unfinished theatre.
It was shambolic. Her microphone, fixed to a stand that could
be raised or lowered, went out of control during a particularly
poignant song and shot up comically towards the flies as if in
a Morecambe and Wise sketch. I felt sorry for this great old
lady, reduced to singing in a seaside theatre that seemed totally
unprepared for her. After endless curtain calls and flowerchucking
from an army of young men, who, delirious and
hyperventilating with adulation and unable to contain themselves,
ran down the aisle screaming like mad things to pelt
their goddess with bunches of flowers, I was asked if I'd like to
meet the great woman. Curious, Tony and I were ushered
backstage into the area by the stage door to wait for her.