Still Standing: The Savage Years (14 page)

CHAPTER 5

ON A BALMY
July night Vera and I were sitting in the Lisbon enjoying a little drink when a couple of queens came charging down the stairs in a state of extreme agitation.

‘They’re rioting in Toxteth! Every house along Upper Parly is on fire,’ one of them screamed in a manner worthy of Scarlett O’Hara describing the burning of Atlanta.

‘Anarchy reigns in the city tonight,’ the smaller of the two shouted dramatically, determined not to be left out of the limelight. ‘We should take to the streets!’

I got caught up in this frenzy and would have been quite happy to take to the streets. Vera, however, was less impressed.

‘Don’t fuckin’ start, Lily,’ he said, a little jittery at this rabble-rousing. ‘We don’t want to be getting involved.’

Fortunately Vera had the keys to the flat of his latest squeeze, who very conveniently happened to be away working in London for the week. This flat was also dangerously close to where the riots were in full swing and to me it seemed foolish not to take advantage and go back there to experience the riot first hand. After a few more drinks Vera was easily persuaded to go back, especially when I reminded him that the bar was about to close, we didn’t have much money and
this beau of his had an extremely well-stocked wine cellar sitting there sad and neglected.

‘This is an historic moment, Vera,’ I said excitedly, trying to gee him up. ‘We might never see the likes again.’

‘And we might never see the light of day again either,’ Vera glared balefully at me, ‘if someone chucks a petrol bomb at us.’

‘That won’t bother you, Vera,’ I said, dragging him to his feet. ‘You’ll just mix it with a bit of tonic water and knock it back. C’mon, let’s go.’

On the way out of the pub we met Paul, a fairly new acquaintance of ours who had the luxury of a car. Paul was even more reluctant than Vera to go anywhere near the riots but after a bit of the hard sell I managed to coerce him into driving us up there. Paul had only recently come out of the closet and it was all still a bit new to him. He’d never seen the likes of Vera and me before, particularly Vera, and looked at us on our first meeting with the same mixture of terror and awe that I’d experienced on encountering Penny and Francis on my first visit to the Lisbon.

We drove around the streets at first until Paul, concerned for the safety of his car, insisted on getting away from the area. After dropping me and Vera off at the flat he sensibly went home.

We fortified ourselves with a few drinks before venturing out on to the streets again and when we eventually did I couldn’t quite comprehend what I was witnessing. The first thing that hit me, apart from the throngs of people, was the intense heat. It seemed that every single building was alight, blazing furiously and spewing a myriad of sparks upwards to dance among the swirling plumes of thick black smoke. The effect was satanic.

Standing on the corner of the street, I watched the Rialto, a once famous ballroom that had been reduced to a secondhand furniture shop in the twilight of its life, burn to the ground and felt more than a little sad at witnessing the demise of so familiar a landmark. I’d once bought a slightly battered bamboo bedside table there that wobbled, and a couple I knew had paid ten quid for the wreck of a 1930s three-piece suite that once they’d cleaned it up and repaired it revealed a beauty that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Poirot’s drawing room.

The noise was deafening, people everywhere, either huddled into groups quietly watching the carnage unfolding before their disbelieving eyes or running around screaming and shouting, hurling missiles at the scores of police chasing after them. I watched a teenage lad make a Molotov cocktail out of a milk bottle filled with petrol. He stuffed the T-shirt he’d torn off his back into the neck of the bottle and after lighting it hurled it across the road, whooping with delight and punching the air in triumph when it hit a wall and exploded.

It was both exciting and terrifying at the same time and a terrific adrenalin rush, being among such total mayhem and madness. That little queen was right, anarchy did indeed reign that night. The anger that had built up over the years as a result of poverty, government apathy, neglect, racial discrimination and the ever-mounting tension between the police and members of this diverse community had finally come to a head. And this was the result.

In Catherine Street we found ourselves caught up in a mob who were facing a group of police officers with riot shields. Someone threw a petrol bomb which thankfully extinguished itself as it flew through the air. The police charged, scattering
the mob and sending me and Vera running in the direction of Huskisson Street, where we encountered two women with a shopping trolley filled with cigarettes and booze hurtling down the middle of the road as if they were taking part in a trolley dash.

By the time we got back to the flat dawn was breaking. Our clothes and hair reeked of smoke and our blackened hands and faces made us look as if we were part of a turn-of-the-century travelling minstrel show. We took showers and changed out of our stinking clothes into some very nice towelling dressing gowns and made a fry-up for breakfast, after which we collapsed and went to sleep.

When we awoke it was early afternoon and we assumed that by now the riots would’ve fizzled out and everyone would’ve gone back to their homes, those that still had homes standing, that is. Instead the riots seemed to have increased. Looking down into the street below, we could see gangs advancing up the hill, each member carrying an assortment of weapons ranging from pieces of wood to the fender of a car.

Vera put the kettle on while I popped across the street in my towelling dressing gown to borrow a bottle of milk that was miraculously still upright on the step of the house opposite. I also rang home in case my mother was worrying and when she eventually answered the phone – ‘I was upstairs, going through the insurance policies’ – she told me that at around midnight she’d stood with Dot-Next-Door at the top of Sidney Road and watched Liverpool burn.

‘It was like the war all over again, watching the Luftwaffe bomb Liverpool docks, a sight I thought I’d never see again,’ she sighed.

I started to tell her what it was like where we were but she cut me short.

‘Don’t tell me you’re looting and rioting,’ she roared. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, don’t be bringing any gear that you’ve looted into this house.’

I assured her that I had no intention of looting the Kwik Save or torching any buildings.

‘Get out of there,’ she warned. ‘It’s not safe, all hell has broken loose.’

Did I heed my mother’s advice? Of course not. Instead we rang our friends and acquaintances and invited them round to the flat that night for an impromptu ‘riot party’. We had a good idea how Vera’s paramour was going to react when he got home and discovered that his supply of booze was seriously diminished, but in the true spirit of the revolution being played out on the streets below we didn’t care.

Quite a few people turned up for our riot party and by ten o’clock the place was rocking. The noise attracted the unwelcome attention of a gang outside who started throwing cans and bricks up at the window.

‘It’ll be a petrol bomb next,’ someone shouted, ‘or they might kick the door in.’ This caused mass panic to sweep through the party.

Hanging on the wall were three antique guns. One of them, a beautifully engraved blunderbuss, I quickly put to good use.

Opening the window I hung out and aimed it at the gang, crying, ‘Git off ma land, you varmints!’ It was a phrase I’d often wanted to use ever since Granny Clampett of
The Beverly Hillbillies
had said it after telling Jethro to ‘Fetch me ma gun, boy.’

‘Get that daft cow in, will you,’ Vera shouted, panicking at the sight of me with a gun.

The blunderbuss wasn’t loaded, or at least I assumed it
wasn’t, but it had the desired effect and the gang cleared off, running up the street and shouting abuse.

Empowered by my success at driving away the Goths and Vandals with the blunderbuss, not to mention the amount of fine old Irish whiskey I’d put away, I wanted to ‘take to the streets again’ so a party of us, including Vera, ventured out.

We didn’t stay out long as even a drunken fool like me could see that the riots were far worse than the previous night and this was no place to be. It was like a war zone. The mob were feral and very angry, wreaking havoc on the streets. It was as my mother had said: all hell had broken loose. We returned to the flat a slightly more subdued and sober group than when we had left. We sat around for a while drinking and discussing what we had seen until the party dispersed and only Vera and I were left.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Vera said, staggering towards the gloom of the bedroom like an alcoholic vampire. ‘The sun’s coming up.’

I looked out of the window. The sky was blood red but it had nothing to do with the sunrise. The heavens that morning owed their crimson hue to the flames below as Liverpool 8 burned to the ground.

‘They want hangin’,’ my mother exclaimed as she read the latest on the aftermath of the riots in the
Liverpool Echo
. ‘Shops looted, buildings burned down, over four hundred coppers injured, I’ve never heard anything like it, and you in the bloody thick of it.’

The morning I returned home from the flat in Liverpool she made me undress in the back yard as I smelt like a burning building. Vera and I only stayed two nights but the riots raged on for nine. We tidied up before we left and collected all the
empty bottles in a couple of bin-liners. We had the good sense not to put them out by the bins, where undoubtedly they’d be picked up and thrown as ammunition, but to leave them safely in the hall instead.

As predicted, Vera’s gentleman went ballistic on his return home, paying Vera a visit at his brother’s. We were in the front room watching the telly and ignored his persistent hammering on the front door. When he started banging on the window and shouting, ‘I know you’re in there,’ we adopted the time-honoured tradition and hit the deck. After a while Vera opened the door. I don’t know what was actually said but I do know that the poor fellah went away with a flea in his ear and his spare keys in his pocket and hopefully a lesson well learned, which is that no matter how infatuated you are with a one-night stand you don’t go giving them the keys to your flat and telling them to help themselves. They may just take you at your word.

My daily visits to the Job Centre were always futile. I applied for what few jobs were advertised in the back of the
Echo
but didn’t even receive an acknowledgement from most of them. I even applied to Arrowe Park Hospital to train as a nurse. I was positive I’d sail through the interview but was brought smartly back down to earth when two matronly ladies told me quite bluntly that I wasn’t nursing material and turned me down flat.

Apart from a temporary post for a few weeks in a small children’s home, it seemed that my luck at landing a job had run out, as had my savings.

‘There’s nothing for it but to get yourself down to the Brew and sign on,’ my mother announced one morning. ‘After all, you’ve paid your stamp so you’re entitled to it.’ I was amazed
my mother had suggested this as she had a loathing of ‘living off the parish’. It recalled the old days of her poverty-stricken childhood, and the horrors of the means test and the threat of the workhouse.

Signing on each week was a chore I hated. The amount they doled out was paltry yet they acted as if it were coming out of their own pocket. My signing-on time was 9.15. I’d drag myself out of bed and down to Hamilton Square and join the queue to give my autograph to a woman who looked like she had a knitting needle shoved up her arse. If you were late they demanded an explanation and then told you off, making you swear you’d never be late again. Sporadically you’d be told that the supervisor wanted to see you, and the queue of people would look at you sympathetically as you slunk off to the end booth to await the inevitable interrogation.

In the end, after a completely unnecessary grilling for being ten minutes late I told them to stuff their money, or words to that effect, and felt all the better for it. Having cut my nose off to spite my face, I needed to find a job, and quickly.

‘Why don’t you go back to doing drag?’ Diane asked me one day as I sat at the back of Flo’s market stall, hidden from view by an enormous rattan dressing table.

‘Cos it’s out of the question,’ I told her through a mouthful of bacon sarnie from Betty’s Café. ‘There’s no way I’m going back to that.’

‘But why?’ Diane persevered.

I chewed on my sandwich for a moment as I tried to think of a good reply.

‘Because it’s over, that’s why’ was the best I could come up with. ‘I’m finished with all that nonsense. From now on I want to lead a normal life.’

‘Normal? You? You don’t know the meaning of the word,’
Diane snorted, making her way to the front of the stall to serve a tiny old lady. ‘Normal? Don’t make me laugh.’

All right then, so I was classified abnormal, but even with this extra qualification I still couldn’t get a job and if something didn’t turn up soon I’d have to seriously consider going back to drag. The prospect didn’t appeal to me in the least.