The Devil Rides Out

by Paul O'Grady

  ‘Crystal, Mrs Dickie.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Dickie.’

  I am dragged back on to the unit from scouring urinals and made to pull a bed away from the wall. Mrs Dickie proceeds to run her finger along the waterpipes and bed rails then holds it under my nose for inspection.

  ‘And what is this, Mr O’Grady?’

  ‘It looks like dust, Mrs Dickie.’

  ‘Correct. And you have children in your care who suffer from severe asthma. Dust such as this could bring on an attack. Get it cleaned if you will, please.’

  ‘But isn’t it the cleaner’s fault there are dusty pipes?’

  ‘No. The children are in your care, not hers.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Dickie.’

  I hated myself for rolling over and being so subservient but it was easier than confrontation as Mrs Dickie was never wrong.

  Clean unit and finally go down for coffee and fag break with fellow workers, bemoaning our lot in life, until Dickie puts her little grey head around the door and asks us if we’ve any intention of returning to work.

  10.30am

  Break time from school. The teachers don’t supervise the kids during playtime, that task is left to us. They retire to the cosy staff room for coffee and biscuits while we try to keep our charges in order. Change any colostomy bags, apply creams, supervise medications, etc.

  11.00am

  Return kids to school. Check the boys’ lockers. Tommy’s has two used and very full colostomy bags hidden at the back. Check and sort the linen cupboard, repair holes and replace buttons on any clothes that need it, which seems to be most of them. Up till then I’d never so much as threaded a needle, now here I am stitching away like the brave little tailor.

  12 noon

  Collect boys and take them into the dining hall for dinner. We sit and eat with the children and it is my least favourite part of the day. I try and teach them some table manners, to no avail, so I slope off and have a sly fag with Janet, one of the housemothers. Get caught having sly fag by ‘she who must be obeyed’ and verbally cleaned to within an inch of our lives. Return to dining room, supervise playtime, making sure that any of the kids who need changing or medication are sorted out. Take Stephen to the loo. Return kids to school.

  2pm

  One hour’s break so sit in the staff room drinking tea and smoking as leaving the building is not encouraged.

  3pm

  Return reluctantly to the unit. Sit on a bed with Roma, another housemother, swinging our legs and chatting until Dickie arrives unexpectedly and enquires if we have nothing better to do and if we knew that beds are not for sitting on. Clean downstairs showers and toilets.

  4pm

  Kids arrive back from school and line up hungrily in what was probably once a gym for a piece of cake and a glass of milk off a tea trolley.

  5–7pm

  A period known as Activities. This involves traipsing round West Kirby pushing a wheelchair with a gang of kids hanging off it or sitting in a ridiculously small room known as the telly room trying to keep them entertained for two hours. The telly is a tiny black and white portable of dubious age that sits on a high shelf in the corner and has the same lousy reception as the antique in the live-in staff’s sitting room upstairs. The more able-bodied boys go off to play sports or do something with a Christian group called the Crusaders.

  7pm

  Supper. Those of us who have been on the dreaded Activities are given fifteen minutes to go and have something to eat ourselves, usually rubbery luncheon meat and cold mashed potatoes or my bête noire, cheese pie.

  7.30pm

  Get the boys washed and ready for bed, check that they have clean shoes and school uniforms for the morning. Bathe the boys with skin conditions in an oatmeal bath and then plaster them with various creams. Betnovate for the eczemas and something foul-smelling and sticky for the boy with psoriasis. Get Stephen ready for bed, which always takes quite some time as understandably it requires a lot of different positioning in the bed until he is comfortable. Read the boys a story, tuck them in before lights out at eight thirty-ish. Clean bathroom, toilets and sluice, write up notes and if all is quiet on the Western Front leave at 9.30, arrive home if I am lucky at 10.45. Sit eating cheese on toast and watching a bit of telly until the white dot appears and the continuity announcer cheerily reminds me to make sure I’ve turned the television set off. He’s followed closely by a slightly louder reminder from my mother upstairs, who has a phobia about all things electric, to make sure I’ve pulled all the plugs out and turned everything off. In bed by midnight. Up again at six to start the whole bloody circus anew.

  Most of the regular children went home at the end of each term. Only a handful of kids remained behind, including Stephen and Andy and some of the more severely disabled children who had nowhere else to go. To make sure that the staff didn’t idle the time away we were ordered to clean the place from top to bottom, scrubbing floors, washing walls down, scraping off the wax that had steadily accumulated on the wheelchairs’ wheels and perform endless other tasks. Add to this a number of disabled children who came to stay for a month as convalescents and you’re talking hard graft.

  I had a real affection for the Down’s syndrome children. I loved them and still do. One in particular, a Welsh girl named Moya who must’ve weighed in at fifteen stone and could probably fell a brewery dray horse with a single blow, was one of my favourites. She was indiscriminate as to where and to whom she would drop her drawers and reveal her bare backside. She got us banned from the newsagent’s by the station. Sensing that the owner wasn’t very keen on having gangs of kids from the Conny Home in his shop she consequently dropped the voluminous bloomers and bent over, offering the rather proper proprietor a bird’s-eye view of her ample buttocks. To give this action a bit more clout she’d shout her name at the top of her voice and slap her bum repeatedly in a manner reminiscent of a tribal war dance. It was quite a sight and caused pandemonium among the more genteel members of West Kirby society. I personally laughed until I got a stitch in my side every time she did it. Not very professional behaviour, I know, but I just couldn’t help myself nor could I bring myself to tell off this otherwise enchanting girl.

  One of the nursing sisters, a grisly little Irish woman, said to me one day in the dispensary, ‘They’re not human, you know, Down’s children.’

  ‘How d’ya mean, Sister?’ That statement sounded a little too Third Reich for my liking.

  ‘I don’t mean this in any nasty way, I just mean that they are so very special, untainted by worldly worries, that I really do believe they are related to the faery folk.’

  I knew exactly what she meant. Down’s children are indeed very special and we can learn a lot from them. Unsullied, they see the world and those who inhabit it with a different eye and are a joy to be with.

  One good thing about the holidays was that we got to take the children to the cinema. There was a really old-fashioned local picture house that didn’t mind us bringing a gang of kids in on a Saturday morning. In fact they went out of their way to accommodate us by opening fire doors so the kids in wheelchairs had easier access, and even gave them free drinks and ice cream. There was quite a steep rake in this cinema, and I’d park my two wheelchairs in the aisle next to my seat where I could keep an eye on them, Andy next to me with Stephen close behind him. Halfway through the film I heard Andy cry out, ‘Sir, Stephen has taken my brake ahhfffffff …’ just before he rolled down the aisle and into the orchestra pit. With his severely limited mobility it had taken Stephen the best part of forty minutes to lean forward and surreptitiously remove the brake on Andy’s wheely.

  Thankfully Andy lay unhurt but squawking like a parrot upside down in his chair, trapped in the folds of the velvet curtain that ran around what was once the orchestra pit, while his nemesis Stephen sat shaking in his chair, what bits he could still shake, tears of laughter running down his cheeks. What could I say to him? I was roaring with laught
er myself and besides, it did your heart good to see him having fun even if it was at Andy’s expense.

  Stephen was a brave lad who accepted the curse of muscular dystrophy without complaint. After I’d been at the home nearly three years I came in one morning to find his mattress rolled up and his locker cleared out. I didn’t have to ask where he was, I knew what had happened by the red eyes and trembling lips of the other housemothers and fathers. It was Shelagh, a housemother unsurpassed at caring for children, who took me into the sluice and gently told me that he’d died in the night. I was devastated.

  ‘Where have all his pictures gone from around his bed,’ was all I could think of saying, ‘and the little radio I bought him?’

  ‘Mrs Dickie took them all down earlier. She wants us to take his mattress downstairs to be fumigated and—’

  Before she could finish the sentence I was off in a blind rage and down to Dickie’s office, barging in without even bothering to knock. How could she be so clinical and unfeeling towards a boy who she knew we were all so fond of?

  Dickie was sat behind her desk, Stephen’s pictures of the Bay City Rollers spread out in front of her. She gave me a sad little look that silenced me in my tracks. ‘Yes I know, dear,’ she said calmly and quietly, ‘I’m so very sorry as I realize how close you were to him, we all were, but you must remember that we still have other children in our care. Their welfare comes first and foremost and we must remain professional at all times, regardless of any heartbreak. Life must go on as normal for the children’s sake. Now go and get yourself a cup of coffee and gather your wits.’

  It was at that moment I realized just what a supreme nurse Mrs Dickie was. All the bullying and cajoling to motivate us, the obsession with cleanliness and high standards, it was all for the sake of the children. If hospitals today had the likes of a Mrs Dickie at the helm then I dare say there would be no such things as MRSA or E. coli; no self-respecting germ would dare put its slimy foot near any of Mrs Dickie’s wards. I’ve seen her sit up all night nursing a child who was having a severe asthma attack when she should have been off-duty, and watched her roll her sleeves up and get stuck in when we were short-staffed. The woman was a bloody legend.

  I was three years working at the Conny Home, the longest I’d ever stayed in any of my jobs so far, and it was during this period that I first met Vera. Aficionados of Lily Savage will know that Vera was Lily’s sister, but how many realize that Vera actually exists? Diane and I were in one of our ‘getting on like a house on fire’ periods; we’d even spent Sharon’s first Christmas together, although if I recall rightly we were at each other’s throats come the Queen’s Speech. However, during this relatively halcyon phase we thought we’d enter a fancy dress competition at the Bear’s Paw. Sharon was a toddler now and no longer screamed like a banshee if she was left alone in a room with me. These days she preferred to glower at me mistrustfully from her high chair, her bottom lip the size of a Suri tribeswoman’s and wobbling dangerously.

  I’m not very impressed with tiny babies. Their sole purpose in life, as far as I can see, is to eat, sleep, shit and scream and turn perfectly sane and amiable adults, who once had lives of their own, into complete baby-obsessive bores (‘I’m sure she smiled at me today’ … ‘Who drank nearly a whole bottle this morning then?’ … ‘She slept all through the night, didn’t you? Yes you did, who’s a good little girl for her mummy?’ … ‘Would you like to hold her?’ etc.) and indeed I do like to hold them as long as I can give ‘em back but I much prefer them as toddlers, when they’re far more interesting. Now that Sharon was nearly two I was beginning to get over my earlier fears and even secretly finding her very appealing.

  The three of us, Diane, myself and the baby, went over to a fancy dress hire shop that we’d heard of in New Brighton to see if we could find anything suitable for the Bear’s Paw’s fancy dress do. I felt quite proud pushing Sharon along the prom in her buggy, trying to pretend that Diane wasn’t with me as she trailed behind, her nose running in the biting wind, shuffling along in unsuitable footwear like an old Chinese concubine with bound feet, moaning, ‘Hang on, will you? I can’t walk very fast in these shoes.’ Why pay a small fortune for a pair of shoes that don’t fit you, are crippling to wear and are impossible to walk a couple of yards in without screaming in silent agony just because you think those killer heels will make you the envy of every other woman on the street? I know, I know, it’s a woman’s thing … an unfathomable mystery to most men unless you happen to be a tranny or a drag queen and something I didn’t understand myself until I started forcing my size nine and a halfs into a pair of size seven mules from Huddersfield market. My feet look like quavers today, a legacy of twenty-five years of Lily bloody Savage – even though eventually, when I was earning a few bob, I started having Lily’s shoes handmade by Mr Savva of Chiltern Street and oh, the bliss of that, handmade stilettos crafted out of soft kid leather.

  Our trip turned out to be a bit of a wasted journey as there wasn’t much of a selection in this drab little shop which, not surprisingly, is now long gone. There was just the usual grimy tat and dusty Am-Dram cast-offs for which you’d need a tetanus jab before you’d dare put one on. In the end we made the best of a bad job and hired two ballet dancers’ outfits, but only after Diane assured me that she’d have these two louse-ridden costumes with their greasy seams and dubious stains dry-cleaned before we wore them on the big night. I was going as Margot Fonteyn and Diane as Rudolf Nureyev, not my ideal choice, but given the circumstances and our highly limited finances there was no other choice. We sat in a café and had fish and chips before making the trek back to the flat in Bootle. The waitress made a huge fuss of Sharon, remarking to Diane while looking at me, ‘She’s the ringer of her dad, isn’t she?’ I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. To be mistaken for part of a cosy domestic scene terrified me.

  Later that afternoon, when we made it back to Diane’s, she found that she had unexpected company.

  ‘Hiya, girl, yer downstairs neighbour opened the front door for us and since your flat door was open we thought we’d come up and wait for yer, hope you don’t mind.’

  It was Penny. Penny was one of the first ‘real’ queens I’d come across after a guy I’d met took me to the Lisbon, a Liverpool gay pub. I’d been a little wary of Penny at first, not being impressed in those not-so-distant days with men who acted like women and called themselves by female names. However, exposure to the gay scene had made me a lot more liberal-minded and less uptight, and besides, who was I to throw stones at glass houses seeing as I was now renowned in certain circles as ‘Lil’. Penny was a real character, hard as nails and always on the mooch, and if you were short of funds then you could always count on Penny to find a ‘mush’ to buy you a half of cider. Diane’s make-up was spread all over the kitchen table and Penny was carefully smearing foundation on a younger queen’s face.

  ‘This is me mate, Alissssssse.’ Penny drew his ‘S’s out like the snake in The Jungle Book. I recognized this Alice as someone I’d once refused to serve when I was working as a barman in the Bear’s Paw. He’d come in one night just before closing time absolutely out of his mind and stood swaying at the bar like an Indian fakir’s cobra, his watery eyes starting to meet in the middle behind a pair of round John Lennon specs tinted orange. He was incapable of coherent speech and clutched on to the bar top for dear life as he tried to steady himself and order a drink before a combination of booze and gravity got the better of him and he finally hit the floor with a loud slap and a low moan. I can visualize him now being helped to a bench by a couple of customers: slightly smaller than me, as thin as a lath (he made Olive Oyl look clinically obese), shoulder-length blond hair parted down the middle, the specs with lenses as thick as milk-bottle bottoms sliding down his nose. His ensemble consisted of a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs T-shirt, skin-tight denim loons, torn and frayed at the hem, a ratty old fur coat and flip-flops. ‘Bloody drugged-up hippy,’ I sniffed, giving him a filthy look my ma and m
y aunty Chris would’ve been proud of.

  I looked at him now, sat in Diane’s kitchen with a full face of badly applied make-up and squirming uncomfortably on a kitchen chair. Penny stood back, sucking on a tail comb, and proudly admired his handiwork.

  ‘I’ve always been good with make-up,’ he boasted without a hint of irony in his voice. ‘She’d easily pass as a real woman, don’t ya think? Look at her, she’s as camp as Christmas, aren’t you, queen?’

  Penny spoke to Alice in the same way Hylda Baker spoke to Cynthia and it was very hard not to laugh. Alice brought a new meaning to the word ‘camp’ and at first glance it was hard to tell whether he was a girl or a boy. He peered myopically at me through blind eyes before frantically rummaging among the make-up on the table for his glasses. His face fell when he recognized me and you could see him flushing a deep shade of crimson even under the inch-thick make-up.

  ‘Hiya,’ he muttered, mortified with shame.

  ‘Hiya,’ I answered back, trying not to laugh. Little did I know that this Alice and I were to become lifelong friends (give or take a couple of years when we fell out).

  ‘I’ll go and wash this off and get changed,’ he mumbled, making his way to the bathroom. It was only then that Diane realized what he was wearing.

  ‘Get my halter top off, please,’ she shouted after him as he skulked out of sight. ‘And my earrings if you don’t mind. Honestly, bloody queens.’

  Alice was to undergo many changes of name over the years – Blanche, Miriam, Mrs McGoo – before finally arriving at the moniker by which almost everyone knows him today, Vera Cheeseman. Confused? You will be. In the thirty-five years that I’ve known him I’ve never called him by his real name, which happens to be Alan. Neither has he ever called me Paul. I’ve always been Lily or, as he pronounces it when he’s had a drink, Lully. He adopts a ‘half-crown’ voice when he’s pissed that very few people can comprehend. Fortunately, after years of experience, I can now speak and understand ‘Veranese’ fluently and over the decades have been called upon on many an occasion to translate for bemused strangers.