Still Standing: The Savage Years (16 page)

‘What?’ he muttered, half asleep.

‘We’re here,’ I said, collecting the bin-liner containing the wigs from the luggage rack. Since Hush’s departure I’d had to learn how to dress the wigs and found after a series of trial and error that the most successful method was plenty of back-combing. Early attempts had resulted in a look that bore more resemblance to an electrified Persian cat than a finely
teased coiffure. After a while I got better, although it had to be said that the wigs were far from the masterpieces that Hush created.

‘Did you get eyelash glue?’ Vera yawned.

‘And where the hell am I going to find eyelash glue in Birkenhead?’ I snapped back. ‘I’ll get some in Leeds, we’ll have to make do with the Copydex till then.’

Copydex was more suited to DIY than sticking false eyelashes on, but it did the job even if it did tend to take the skin off your eyelids when you removed the lashes. Vera couldn’t do his own make-up, he couldn’t see to do it even if he wanted to, so the task fell to me. For a drag queen I hated putting make-up on, it was like painting the same section of kitchen wall over and over again, so having to do Vera’s make-up as well as my own was a double chore. On nights when we were running late or if I had the hump, I’d pound the powder into poor Vera’s face with the gusto of a debt collector hammering on a front door.

Since Vera and I had hit the road we’d travelled the length and breadth of northern England. For the first time in my life I got to see Blackpool. I’d always wanted to go there when I was a kid but my mother thought it was ‘common’ so we went to the Isle of Man to stay in a boarding house in Douglas instead. That she considered to be a lot more upmarket.

We’d been working at Heroes, a club in Manchester, and Basil Newby, the owner of the newly opened Flamingo club in Blackpool, asked us if we’d like to work there. The contract was for a Sunday lunchtime and two nights and it was like a holiday with pay. We stayed in a B and B called Trades, and Vera and I were like kids at Disneyland caught up
in the carnival feel of the town. I’ve always thought Blackpool has a unique atmosphere, you either love it or loathe it, but either way you have to admit there’s nowhere else quite like it.

That summer Blackpool was buzzing, all the pubs were packed, most of them belting out Captain Sensible’s ‘Happy Talk’ (which drove me insane) and Madness’s ‘Welcome To The House Of Fun’ (which I loved but that had me doing ‘the walk’ every time I heard it). Yates’s Wine Lodge sold champagne on tap, around the corner you could see Burden and Moran in Olde Tyme Music Hall and for 50 pence you could get a three-course meal (tinned soup followed by meat and two veg and sponge pudding with custard).

One of my favourite haunts was the Tower Ballroom, a magical place that Lucinda Lambton penned the best description of when she compared it to a giantess’s boudoir. We loved to sit and watch the couples dancing to the strains of Phil Kelsall on his mighty Wurlitzer, surely the true sound of Blackpool.

We’d invent life stories for the people. That elderly couple gliding effortlessly as one across the dance floor had met during the war when he’d been stationed in Blackpool and she’d worked in a fish-gutting shed in Fleetwood. Now they came back once a year on the anniversary of the night when they’d first met to dance again. Those two middle-aged women dancing together, an incongruous couple with the smaller of the two leading her much taller and wider partner in a tango? Well, they never married and have been coming here looking for love, albeit unsuccessfully, for the last twenty years. We could spend all day playing this game and even though we knew that the characters were only figments of our imagination they became, for that moment, reality.

I’m glad I got to see the museum piece that was the Fun House at the Pleasure Beach before it regrettably burned down in 1991. It had been featured in the film
Sing As We Go
with Gracie Fields and I’d always wanted to have a go in the large barrel that perpetually spun slowly around. The aim of the game was to walk through it without falling over, a trick that was very hard to pull off. I got stuck in it once after a horde of schoolchildren piled in, pinning me underneath them, until eventually after what seemed like hours I managed to escape, emerging with a black eye and no skin on my hands, knees and elbows.

We were the first act to work at the Flamingo Club. It’s changed beyond recognition since its early incarnation, but it was a club that I always enjoyed working at – just as well as I ended up working there regularly for over a decade.

Accommodation was always a major problem. Fortunately for us, we’d become friendly with the Sisters Slim and Bridie O’Brian, two drag acts based in Leeds who came to our rescue, kindly offering to put us up when we had a block of work in that city.

The Sisters Slim (Ten Tons of Fun!) lived in the notorious Leek Street Flats in Hunslet, South Leeds. The Slims, alias Alan and Danny, were big boys who had capitalized on their mammoth girth. Alan, the bigger of the two, would strip out of a nun’s outfit to reveal a Wonder Woman costume underneath. After a bout of spinning around to the Wonder Woman theme he would then remove this to reveal rolls of fat and layer upon layer of a belly that hung down to his knees. The act was certainly unpretentious and could be described without malice as pretty gross – the London drag queens were appalled by it – yet the Slims were hugely (no pun intended)
popular with audiences and never stopped working. They refused to take any money off us for allowing us to stay there so we’d contribute bags of groceries to the household instead – although considering the amount they consumed on a daily basis it would’ve probably been cheaper to pay rent.

Alan and Danny were a very good-natured pair and they let us share their driver, a happily married man with children who just happened to have a penchant for ladies’ clothes of the British Home Stores variety. His beige pleated skirts and chiffon blouses in delicate pastel shades seemed at odds with the many tattoos covering his arms, hands and neck that he’d acquired during his stint in the merchant navy.

I liked the Leek Street Flats and never felt threatened walking around there, despite their reputation, as the place had a strong neighbourly feel to it. They were a sociable lot, characters were always popping into the Slims’ for a cup of tea and a session of gossip and slander, and some of the conversations I heard would have me falling about laughing. I’d sit on the sofa absorbing the atmosphere and the chatter, thriving on it and subconsciously storing it all up for future use.

The other act who provided shelter from the storm was Bridie O’Brian. He mainly worked solo as a patter act but occasionally teamed up with Leeds’ most infamous drag queen – Vicki Graham. The two of them worked under a name some would say was very apt: the Sisters Grimm. Silver-haired Bridie spoke with a hint of a soft Irish burr. He was very hospitable and every night at six o’clock we sat down around the table for our tea. If we weren’t working, once we’d washed up and watched
Corrie
we’d repair to the New Penny for another night of revelry.

I liked Leeds, so much so that I seemed to spend more time there than I did in Birkenhead. I was also very keen on
Bradford and in particular a pub called the Fleece where we frequently worked. The Fleece was owned by a tough little Australian lesbian of the old-school variety called Maureen who loved the bones of us and we felt exactly the same about her. We spent a lot of time in the Fleece, sitting up till all hours of the night drinking in the bar. In fact it was here that I hung up my wig and retired from drag for a second time.

The act was popular enough and we were earning a decent living, not enough to start digging the back yard up and building a swimming pool but enough to pay my mother her housekeeping and then not have to borrow it back again in the middle of the week. But the travelling around on coaches and relying on the good nature of friends to put us up could be dispiriting at times.

We started noticing that the pubs were cutting down on cabaret as they couldn’t afford a midweek act any more. A lot of the factories and collieries had shut down and times were hard, a fact made evident by the number of pubs boarded up and the lack of work. We couldn’t afford to be picky, which was just as well as some of the venues we were finding ourselves booked into left a lot to be desired. Tickles in Wakefield was one such venue that for some inexplicable reason had drag acts on every Sunday afternoon. All the acts hated working there and none more than me. I felt that bear-baiting or a public execution would’ve been more appropriate entertainment for this establishment.

Walking through the pub to the room at the back to get ready, I took one look at the audience of predominantly young males, most of them steaming drunk and aggressive with it, and didn’t need to be Doris Stokes to know that two grown men dressed as Snow White and her Stepmother skipping around the stage was akin to suicide.

Our opening number was a nod to
Hi-de-Hi!
with me as Gladys Pugh and Vera looking remarkably like the real thing as Peggy.

‘Hello, campers! Hi-de-Hi!’ went the familiar cry.

‘Fuck off, you queers,’ came the response, followed by a shower of beer bottles.

After I’d done my bit poor Vera had to stay on, strip out of the chalet maid’s overall and stand alone in nothing but a Marks and Spencer’s vest and knickers.

I’d had enough. Wild horses wouldn’t get me back out there so I sat on the stairs and started to take my make-up off. As I smeared on the Crowe’s Cremine (the best make-up remover in the world) I could hear the mob in the bar going wild – God knows what Vera was doing out there but whatever it was, it was going down a treat. I opened the door a fraction and was treated to the sight of Vera being spun round by his arm and leg by a couple of Neanderthals in rugby shirts. I stood watching in horror as Vera flew through the air as limp as a rag doll before hitting the dance floor and sliding across it towards the wall with the speed of a sliotar during a violent game of hurling.

I roared at the DJ to stop the tape as Vera staggered past me. ‘They’ve just spun me round, the bastards, and flung me into the wall,’ he said indignantly. ‘I’m not going back out there.’

‘Too right you’re not,’ I said, handing him the tub of Cremine. ‘Here, get your slap off.’

One of the staff came swaggering in dressed in a shiny powder-blue shell suit that was a little on the small side. He looked like ten pounds of shit in a two-pound bag.

‘What the hell d’ya think you’re doing?’ he shouted. ‘You should be out there.’

‘What’s it look like?’ I snapped back through a mouthful of Crowe’s Cremine. ‘We’re getting changed. You don’t want cabaret in this dump, you want fairground rides. I think they mistook me for an Aunt Sally and Vera a fuckin’ Chair-O-Plane. Just give us our fee and we’ll be off.’ I was losing it now. All self-control, like Elvis, had left the building.

‘You want paying?’ he said. ‘For that?’

I wanted to kill this gormless moron in front of me and then run amok among the crowd with a chainsaw, indiscriminately hacking off limbs.

‘Look, mate, if I were you I’d get back out there cos if you don’t you might not get out of this place in one piece,’ Shell Suit said menacingly.

‘Are you threatening me, gobshite?’ I asked.

‘Just a bit of advice. We don’t put up with any messin’ in here from the acts,’ he warned. ‘Now are you going back on?’

‘Listen,’ I hissed, ‘have you ever heard of the O’Grady Brothers from Birkenhead?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Should I?’

‘Well, if you don’t know them now you soon will. I’m one of them, my eldest brother is doing life for murder, two others are serving eight for armed robbery and the remaining four, who aren’t in nick, would think nothing of torching this dump with you inside it. Now are you going to pay up?’

He paid up. In full.

‘Well at least you got the money out of him,’ Vera said on the way home.

‘To the O’Grady Brothers,’ I said, raising a can of Coke by way of a salute. ‘And long may they come in handy.’

We’d really plumbed new depths though when we ended up in the Queen’s, a pub on the notorious Lumb Lane. The
landlady was a very pleasant woman who gave us drinks on the house and took us into the snooker room, which she explained she’d closed off for the night so we could use it to get changed in. She’d even provided a large mirror for us.

‘It might be OK here,’ I said optimistically to Vera, busy punching a dent out of his Salvation Army bonnet. ‘I’ll just go and have a look at the stage, shall I?’

The stage was a crude plywood affair, about four foot high, that had been built right outside the ladies’ toilet and closely facing a wall with a row of chairs along it. Ninety-eight per cent of this stage was occupied by a behemoth of a DJ console, leaving a tiny wedge at the corner that didn’t look as if it could accommodate one person, let alone two.

The crowd were rowdy but good-humoured, a fair percentage of them obviously working girls and their ‘protectors’, which meant if all else failed our hookers routine would go down well.

The DJ spoke over an excruciating bout of feedback from the mike which we took to be an introduction. Turning our tape on, we trooped out through the crowd, who groped us, squeezed us and touched us up in places that were thankfully well protected under three pairs of supermarket tights and a panty girdle.

Despite the enormity of the DJ console the sound was appalling. It was as if the tape was being played from an ice cream van three streets away – not that it mattered that the sound was so distorted, you couldn’t have heard it anyway over the screams of the crowd. We climbed up on to a chair and on to the wedge, barely able to move in case we fell off, not helped by a group of women on their way to the toilet stopping to have a good feel of our ankles and legs. Their hands were all over us. I tapped one of them on the head with
my trumpet in a vain attempt to get her to let go of my ankle but she was so stoned she didn’t feel it.

I was glad to get off and leave Vera to it.

‘It’s going well,’ the landlady shouted cheerily across the bar as I ran semi-demented into the snooker room to get changed. ‘They love you.’ I just wished they weren’t so physical in showing it.