At My Mother's Knee (44 page)

'Have you met our new yum-yum girl?' he said to a
customer. 'She Shanghai Lily, the Deadly White Flower of the
Wirral.'

I'd vowed I'd never be called by a girl's name but the nickname stuck, and much to my annoyance some of the
customers started to call me Lil.

Tony thought it a fabulous name and gave me a copy of
William Walton's popular song with the opening lines 'Lily
O'Grady, silly and shady, wanted to be a lazy lady'. 'It was
meant to be,' he said. 'It was written in the stars, you were
destined to be a Lily.'

Since he thought it so bloody funny I rechristened him Ruby
Arbuckle, a name he absolutely revelled in.

'The guy on the door said that someone called Shanghai Lil
would look after me.' An extremely tall man in dark glasses
and a white stetson was standing at the bar.

I wanted to crawl under it with shame. Who was this pisstaking
cowboy? He stood out like a sore thumb among the
regulars of the Bear's Paw. I dismissed him as a loon and carried
on washing glasses.

'What can I get you, big feller?' Brian asked, looking at the
stranger and grinning like the Joker, suddenly turning on the
charm.

'These are on the house,' Gordon said, sidling up to the cowboy
all smiles. 'Give LJB whatever he wants.'

Who was this guy that had the normally dour Brian running
around after him and the notoriously parsimonious Gordon
pressing him to have whatever he liked? Must be the Pope in
disguise.

Suddenly the cowboy leaned over the bar towards me and
stuck out his hand. '
Long John Baldry
,' he said. 'Would you
like to get your head out of that sink and join me for a drink?'

I looked over at Gordon, who gave me a nod of approval
and opened the bar flap. 'You can come out from behind there,
love, seeing as it's a quiet night and we're not very busy, and
you can sit with Mr Baldry and have a drink with him.' He
sounded like the proprietor of a hostess bar. I didn't know if I
wanted to sit with Long John Baldry and have a drink. I wasn't very impressed. I'd seen him on the telly on
Top of the Pops
but his music didn't appeal to me. I liked T Rex, Motown, jazz
and show music and I thought 'Let The Heartaches Begin',
Baldry's 1967 hit, a bit naff and something strictly for the
grannies and didn't appreciate at the time that I was having a
drink with one of the great names of British blues.

Telling me that he was in Liverpool for a few nights playing
a club date he seemed very laid back and affable as he chucked
down the whiskies, but later on, back at his suite at the
Atlantic Tower Hotel, his mood changed. He became morose
and depressed, retreating into himself and his bottle of Scotch.
I was a bit pissed and babbled on nervously, unsure how to
deal with this strange man. We got on to the subject of music,
his dark mood cleared momentarily and he spoke fondly of
Elton John and Rod Stewart, laughing as he recalled the days
when the Rolling Stones had been his support act. He quickly
grew sad again at the mention of his recent album,
Everything
Stops For Tea
, which he said had totally bombed in America.
We lapsed back into silence.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror at the
end of the room. A Stig of the Dump lookalike sat uncomfortably
on the end of the bed with its chicken legs crossed, staring
back at me. All I was wearing were my underpants, one of a
pack of three from Owen Owen's, a Christmas present from
Aunty Anne. Bri-nylon and bright red, they made my ghostwhite
skin seem even paler. I realized how stupid I looked and
felt about as alluring as a bowl of cold Scotch broth. I made a
move to get dressed.

'I don't know why we bothered getting stripped in the first
place,' I muttered under my breath, angry with myself and
annoyed with the situation. Nothing had happened. Long
John, to put it delicately as I don't want to sound like a kissand-tell scrubber in the
News of the World
, had had one too
many to drink, the whisky I assumed temporarily incapacitating him. It was either that or my red drawers that put the kibosh
on the affair; in any case nothing had occurred.

'Where are you rushing off to in such a hurry?' he asked,
looking up at me as I attempted to maintain my balance while
trying to put my platform boot on and button my shirt at the
same time. 'Don't go, stay and talk, drink a little whisky with
me,' he said, waving the bottle and smiling for a change.
'What's your favourite song?'

I sat down again on the bed, avoiding the mirror, instead
looking out of the window and over the dark waters towards
the lights of Birkenhead and thinking of Aunty Chris. Her
favourite song was 'Seven Golden Daffodils' as sung by Lonnie
Donegan. It seemed a respectable enough choice, one that
wouldn't make me sound like a complete pleb, and so I told
him.

'Really?' he said, brightening up and looking at me in a new
light. 'So you like skiffle and the blues, eh?' He stood up in the
middle of the room wearing nothing but a pair of cowboy
boots and started to sing it. His voice was rich and deep with
a hint of gravel in it that filled the room and most of the hotel.
Within minutes Reception was on the phone to say that a number
of people had complained about the noise and did we
know that it was 3 a.m.? Long John carried on regardless. I
don't think he'd been aware that the phone had even rung, he
was so lost in song – that and being ten parts pissed. Eventually
a security guard came up and banged on the door. Long John
opened it, warmly inviting the man in for a drink. The security
guard politely declined the offer, and if he wondered why I had
one leg in my jeans and why Long John was stark naked apart
from his cowboy boots he was too much of a gentleman to
mention it, accepting Long John's assurance that there would
be no more singing that night as well as a fat tip before going
on his way.

We lay on the bed waiting for dawn to break. He turned to me and said out of the blue, 'I think I'm going mad.' I ignored
him, putting it down to the ego of a troubled and frustrated
star.

Later on he was institutionalized for mental health problems.
I was shocked when I read it in the
NME
. Despite his
mood swings I'd liked him and had spent quite a few evenings
with him since that first encounter. I'd come to realize, as we
chewed the cud over a bottle of whisky, that I was in the presence
of someone who was truly out of the ordinary.

My mother answered the phone to him one night when he
rang me at home.

'Sex, it, dabble tu.'

'Yeah . . . Hi . . . Is Paul in?'

'Yis, whoose spicking plis?'

'It's Long John Baldry.'

'Don't be so bloody 'ard-faced, I was only asking your name
out of politeness, you cheeky sod. Paul! There's one of your
fool mates on the blower who thinks he's a comedian.'

Shame she didn't believe it was him as she quite liked him.

When I told Tony what had happened to poor old Long John
his reply was typical. 'You see, a couple of nights with you and
you drive them insane.'

Coppers that I'd seen hanging around the courts would turn
up at the Bear's Paw from time to time expecting free drinks.
Much as he hated giving away free booze, Gordon would
oblige, not wanting to upset them and risk a raid.

'Does your boss at the Magistrates Court know that you're
working in a queer club?' one of them sneered as he collected
yet another round of free drinks.

'And does your boss know that you're drinking on duty?' I
snapped back, causing Gordon, who was hovering nearby, to
hyperventilate.

'Mind your manners, you mouthy cow,' he said, flashing me a look and steering the copper away from the bar. 'Take no
notice of him, officer, he's a bit political.'

Because I was still going to the odd CHE gathering Gordon
saw me as a political activist. He didn't like or trust 'those student
types' as he called them, making trouble and giving out
about gay rights. I wasn't in the least bit political. The only
demonstration I'd ever been on was the Free Angela Davis
protest march at the Pierhead the year before, and that wasn't
due to any political motivation or because I felt impassioned
about Ms Davis's incarceration. To tell the truth I didn't even
know who she was. The only reason I was keen to join the
protesting masses was because the television cameras were out
in force and I fancied being on
Granada Reports
.

I did, however, object strongly to being expected to pander
to the
police
to avoid harassment from them, and refused to be
amenable to any who showed up at the bar.

Gordon was contemptuous of gay rights. He preferred the
old days when customers knocked three times furtively on the
door to get in and everything was kept under wraps.

I'd been to the first National CHE Conference at
Morecambe, much to Gordon's annoyance ('You'll only get
yourself arrested, daughter, and put me and your real mother
in hospital'), and had taken Tony with me. He wasn't at all
interested in what he called 'political bollocks', ending up
instead doing his bit for the gay cause by going through
Carlisle University's Gay Soc like a dose of salts. Over five hundred
gay men and a smattering of women descended on the
town that weekend, and it was a revelation being surrounded
by so many gay people. Of course there was a bit of fuss from
some of the locals. I suppose it was a shock for them to be confronted
by a coachload of screaming homosexuals singing
'Walking Back To Happiness'. There was also the predictable
abuse from yobs on street corners.

I wasn't as liberated as I made out. I still squirmed with embarrassment at the sight of two grown men holding hands
in public; in fact, any public displays of affection would have
me cringing. I remember sitting in the afternoon sunshine on
the steps of a disused cinema with a very intense young man,
listening to him talk about a German doctor named Hirschfeld
who he said was the father of the gay rights movement and
who had remarked that 'the liberation of homosexuals can
only be the work of homosexuals themselves'. We shared a
packet of Beech Nut chewy and I'd have liked to share a lot
more with him, but he was way too wrapped up in the theory
to get down to the practical. I can picture that yellow and
green Beech Nut wrapper on the step and taste the sharp mint
of the gum as if it were this morning.

I thought a lot about what this
Dr Hirschfeld
had said on the
minibus home and realized that the only way forward was to
be honest. I could picture my parents' faces if I was to drop
that little bombshell on them over corned beef, chips and peas.

'What would you say if I said I was gay?' I asked my mum a
few days later. She was clearing out the cupboard under the
stairs. Backing out, she turned to me holding a birdcage.

'Is there any point keeping this old thing?' she asked, completely
ignoring what I'd said. 'Let's face it, I've no intention of
getting another
budgie
. Dirty, messy things, scattering their
seed all over the bloody house.'

Our
budgie, Joey
, had recently died. He was an ancient old
bird, about to celebrate his twentieth birthday when he tipped
forward on his perch and went to that great aviary in the sky.

'It's a blessing really,' my mother sighed as I lowered his little
corpse, wrapped in a Kleenex, into a hole under the garden
hedge. 'Make sure you've dug it deep enough, we don't want
those bloody cats digging him up.'

Joey hadn't responded to a wolf whistle or a 'Who's a pretty
boy then?' in years, neither had he chirped or peeped at his reflection in his little mirror with the bell. He was silent and
morose, recalling the glory days perhaps when he still had his
full complement of feathers and could fly round the front
room, landing on my dad's specs to take a bit of biscuit out of
his mouth. He no longer took to the air – he couldn't any more
– and so he sat hunched on the furthest corner of his perch, his
head tucked under his scrawny wing or glaring at you through
the bars of his cage with his one good eye.

My mother wasn't keen on having a caged bird in the house;
she considered it unlucky. She wasn't keen on having any animal
in the house really, yet over the years Holly Grove played
host to a variety of creatures. My dad had brought a beautiful
border collie back with him from Ireland, an ex-working
sheepdog named Bran who went slightly mad for the want of
something to do. His predecessor, a border collie puppy, a
sickly little thing bought from Wirral Pets for my tenth birthday,
had to be put down after a few weeks as he had distemper.
He was impossible to housetrain. In the little deposits that he
left around the house I'd find worms, which I'd lower down
the plughole in the bathroom with my mother's tweezers
before she saw them and threatened to throw the pup out. The
shed in the back yard was full of guinea pigs, rats, mice, hamsters,
gerbils, rabbits, catfish and tench and a ferret. My ma
was wary of the ferret. It would stand up on its hind legs and
wrinkle its nose up at her on the kitchen step as she was cooking
the tea.

'Paul, gerrout here and see to this rat, it's threatening me
again.'

'Did you hear me? I said what would you do if I said I was
gay?' I asked again.

'Yes, I did hear you, thank you very much,' she snapped, 'and
I'd be obliged if you didn't go talking like that in front of your
father. You've already made him ill with your shenanigans.'

'Well, what would you do?' I'd gone this far so I might as
well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

'If what?'

'If I said I was, you know, gay.' My nerve was starting to go.

'I'd say that nothing would surprise me about you,' she said,
chortling. She took the birdcage out to the bin in the back
yard. 'Just don't let me catch you wearing my clothes. Gay?
Gay me arse.'