by Paul O'Grady
If she barely tolerated the physiotherapists then the likes of me, a lowly physio aide, she looked upon with the same regard she did the residue of a soiled bedpan. One of my duties every morning was to evacuate the congested lungs of those who had just had surgery, usually elderly men confined to their beds. I’d pat them on the chest repeatedly with cupped palms, encouraging them to cough the contents of their stagnant lungs into a sputum cup. Half the time they’d miss, hitting my hand instead, their phlegm hanging like webbing between my fingers, the very same fingers that ten minutes earlier had been holding a bacon butty. I’d retch my guts up on the spot, giving Sister Woods a valid excuse to lecture me on ward etiquette in front of everyone before showing me the door.
I had my wisdom teeth out at the Northern and was under a general anaesthetic as they were impacted, and after the operation I was put in a side room on Sister Woods’s ward to recover. Anaesthetic, apart from making me ill for months afterwards, has a very strange effect on me and, like alcohol, it makes me lose all inhibitions and do and say things that even I in my worst moments wouldn’t normally dream of. Consequently, as soon as the porter’s back was turned, I escaped, running first on to the ward and exposing myself to Sister Woods before legging it down the Holloway Road, my bare backside hanging out of my hospital gown, with a couple of hysterical nurses in hot pursuit.
My worst job, apart from post-op evacuation that is, was manipulating the freshly hewn stumps of the amputees, raw and bloodied and resembling for all the world a nice joint of marbled sirloin. What I found most disturbing at first was the way the amputees would implore me to scratch imaginary itches on a foot that was no longer there.
My favourite job was in the electromedical department, a latter-day torture chamber, or so it seemed to me, complete with boiling wax to dip the arthritic claws of elderly ladies in and a traction machine to serve as a contemporary version of the rack. Fortunately for the hapless patients, I wasn’t allowed to go near it in case I inadvertently snapped a vertebra in my enthusiam. Joss, a good-natured and very pretty little New Zealander, ran this department, and after we’d set our patients up under the microwave machines we’d retire to the staff room for a cup of tea while the deep heat revived bad backs or swollen knees.
‘You OK in there, Mrs Moore?’ I shouted behind the screens to my favourite patient, surgical stocking rolled down to her ankle to reveal her mottled leg propped up on a stool to allow her ‘bad knee’ half an hour of microwave treatment.
‘Yesh thanksh,’ she’d reply gummily, her false teeth temporarily wrapped in a clean hanky and sat on her lap to ‘give her poor gums a rest’.
A lot of male patients with sports injuries came into this department. Joss would do anything to avoid having to give ultrasound for a hernia as this involved rubbing a torch-like instrument soaked in oil round and round in a slow circular motion in the groin area. Occasionally, some of these virile young men lying spread-eagled and naked from the waist down on a bed with an appealing young woman’s hand centimetres away from their tackle couldn’t control their emotions and would find themselves with an involuntary erection.
Joss, although mortified to the core, was ever the professional. Pointedly ignoring the swaying monster bobbing dangerously near her wrist, she would stare at the ceiling and chat about the weather. She’d say later, after her embarrassed patient had fled the building, that if she’d wanted to give relief massages then she wouldn’t have bothered studying for all those years and that in future I was to do any ultrasounds to gentlemen’s groins. Funny, none of them ever got a hard-on with me.
Two of the male physiotherapists, Dennis and John, were partially sighted, one of them to the point of near blindness. Their hands, in particular their fingertips, were a remarkably accurate substitute for any ocular deficiencies. Dennis claimed that he could ‘see’ through his fingertips into the very tissue, sinew and muscle that lay under the flesh. Watching the Master at work on a patient stricken with a crippling and debilitating back injury as he probed, manipulated and applied just the right amount of pressure to certain areas until his patient, finally released from the misery of constant pain, could walk out of the hospital unaided, I could well believe it. Dennis was a real inspiration, curing a bout of painful sinusitis that I was suffering from by gently manipulating the vertebrae at the top of my spine, causing me to consider physiotherapy as a career even though I was hopelessly unqualified.
Dennis was called up to the private wards one morning as a female patient recovering from knee surgery was requiring treatment. This woman was from Holloway Prison, a stone’s throw away from the Royal Northern. The ice machine on ‘privates’ was broken and so I was sent up with a bowl of ice, Miss Handley quietly informing me as I waited for the lift that the woman I was about to meet was high security and I wasn’t to engage in conversation with her or even look at her.
‘Who is she?’
‘I can’t say, but I’ll tell you this: the woman is evil personified.’
Two coppers standing guard outside the woman’s door grudgingly allowed me to pass, but only after I’d provided them with a lengthy explanation as to who I was. I didn’t know what to expect – a shaven-headed Amazon, nostrils flaring and crazed blood-red eyes popping out of a tattooed head as she tried to struggle free from the straitjacket that held her? Consequently I felt short-changed at the sight of a dark-haired middle-aged woman chatting affably to two women prison guards, swigging tea and swinging her legs as she sat on the end of the bed.
‘Hello,’ she sang out cheerily, fixing me with dead eyes that belied her tone. ‘Have you come to look at my knee as well then?’
I started to explain, forgetting Miss Handley’s instructions outside the lift, but was silenced abruptly by Sister Brogan, a terrifying specimen of womanhood with the raw-boned features and jutting masculine jawline of a Russian peasant.
‘Shut up and get out,’ she barked, grabbing the ice off me and manoeuvring me out of the door and back into the hall. ‘There’s no need for you to be here now we’ve got the ice to bring down the inflammation, thank you very much.’
Who the hell was this woman I wasn’t allowed to speak to, I asked one of the officers on guard outside the door.
‘If I tell you, will you promise to keep your mouth shut about it?’ he said.
‘I won’t say a word,’ I lied.
‘It’s Myra Hindley.’
So that was who she was, none other than the bloody moors murderer herself, unrecognizable as the subject of the familiar mugshot of a bleached blonde child killer with dark circles under her eyes. I was glad I had been thrown out. I might have said something.
*
Searching for decent accommodation in London when you’re trying to exist on a limited to virtually non-existent budget is without doubt, as anyone who has experienced it can testify, one of the most soul-destroying ways to pass a winter’s evening. Each miserable night after work, Angela and I would tramp the streets of the less salubrious parts of north London to view the various flats to let from the ads at the back of the Evening Standard.
I recall a hovel in Highgate: they were all hovels, but this one was as welcoming as the back bedroom of 10 Rillington Place. We stood in the middle of this grim little room and listened to our prospective landlord reassure us that if Angela happened to fall pregnant he’d be more than happy to perform an abortion on the premises, a service that I assumed wasn’t included in the rent.
Our search for a home was made doubly difficult by our different sexes. Two males, fine. Two females? No problem. A male and a female? ‘Sorry, the flat’s been let.’ Landlords seemed to be under the misapprehension that as soon as a couple moved into one of their grubby rented rooms they’d start breeding like rabbits, dropping babies with the alacrity of Queen Victoria. These Rachmanesque landlords existed solely to cheat the desperate and the vulnerable like Angela and me and we’d begun to give up hope of ever finding somewhere to live. Again, it was Lozzy who came to our aid, point
ing me in the direction of a supposedly reputable letting agency near Archway. I rang up first to make an appointment.
‘And how many of you are there looking for accommodation?’ an officious voice asked on the other end of the phone. I couldn’t make out if it was male or female.
‘Two,’ I replied.
‘I must warn you that it is not our policy to rent out to couples. We prefer single men.’
Do you now?
‘Can I take you and your friend’s names please?’
‘Paul O’Grady and Ang—erm, Andrew Walsh.’
I was granted an interview for the following evening but first I had to find an Andrew Walsh to take along to the interview with the owner of the androgynous voice. I had no male friends in London, they were all up in Merseyside, but Angela produced a boy named David from her class at drama school who was willing to play the role.
The gender of the voice on the end of the phone turned out to be male, and if I were a casting director looking for someone to play the part of Rumpelstiltskin then Lionel Crawley would’ve got the job without question. He hopped about the room like a rook on hot coals, wearing one of those red nylon overalls that are meant to look like jackets and are usually found on barmen in social clubs. To make up for his lack of stature he wore boots with platforms at least three inches high and a wig that stuck out on top, a vain attempt, I assumed, at realism but it only made him look ridiculous. In addition, the back of this dusty old teaser had a tendency to curl up like a threadbare doormat peeking over the end of a tenement landing, flapping open each time he waved his hands excitedly about and putting me in mind of the gills of a fish gasping for air.
Much as I disliked him on sight, he obviously took a shine to ‘Andrew’ and me, mistakenly assuming that we were a nice young gay couple deeply in love and looking for a cosy bolt-hole to nest in. Lionel was only too happy to play mother, ushering us into the back of his tiny car and whisking us off to the wilds of north London to view a ‘superior’ property that had only recently come on to his books in a place called Crouch End. I’d vaguely heard of Crouch End but had always assumed that it was a mythical place, a bit of a send-up like Futtocks End, but no, as we drove over Hornsey Rise and down towards Crouch End Hill here it was in all its 1950s suburban misery.
The superior property turned out to be a two-room/kitchen and bathroom ground-floor flat in an old Victorian house situated on a leafy, tree-lined road near the library. It was a big flat, with high ceilings and large windows, a bugger to heat, I heard myself thinking, echoing my mother. Whoever had designed the decor of this flat was either blind or had dropped a tab of a powerful hallucinogen and gone on a rampage in a shop specializing in hideous furniture and psychedelic paint and wallpapers. It was a homage to bad taste that made your eyes bleed if you stared too long.
The floor of the living room was covered in battered and scuffed turquoise lino (did you know that they made turquoise lino?) and an orange rug in the centre had paisley whirls in brown, mustard and green woven into it. The three-piece suite had a six-seater sofa, wonderful if it hadn’t been covered in the most disgusting red and gold velour fabric and then adorned with fringing and tassels. If there was a giantess knocking about Crouch End who fancied becoming a burlesque stripper then here was her brassiere.
‘This came from one of our properties in Golders Green,’ Lionel said, stroking the arm of the monster lovingly. ‘Pure quality, this beautiful sofa, like everything else in this flat.’ The purple velvet curtains adorned with a pattern of fading cabbage roses clashed beautifully with the orange, brown and yellow circle design of the shock sixties wallpaper. The bedroom was sedate in comparison, except that you couldn’t move for the four wardrobes, two beds and seven mattresses that cluttered up the space, whilst the miserable bathroom was familiar territory, shades of Holly Grove – hardly any hot water and freezing. It was going to be fun in the winter.
Despite the generous dimensions of the rooms I didn’t take to this flat at all, in fact I hated it. The rent was more than we could afford at ninety pounds a month, nothing by today’s standards but a sizeable chunk out of your income when your take-home pay was around thirty quid a week, plus Crouch End seemed miles away from anywhere. It would mean more to pay out on bus fares, and disappointingly it also seemed pretty dull compared to the raucous rough-and-ready nature of Camden Town. I came to the sorry conclusion that if it was excitement I was looking for then I wasn’t going to find it in sleepy Crouch End, a hamlet that looked like it shut down at teatime.
Nevertheless I was desperate, and besides I was sick of having to trawl unfamiliar streets each night looking at slums to rent, and so, despite my reservations, I agreed to take it. Lionel was delighted that he’d be providing shelter for two ‘lovely boys’ and it was agreed that pending suitable references and more importantly a month’s rent in advance I’d be able to take possession in a week’s time.
‘It’ll do until we find something better,’ I said to Angela in the pub later, not realizing that I was to stay there three years.
Lozzy and Peggy Handley provided the references and the deposit of eighty pounds came out of my first month’s wages. Angela made sure to tell everyone to address her mail to a sexless A. Walsh, just in case Lionel saw the post in the hall and rumbled that he had, horror of horrors, a female living on the premises. For the first few months, to avoid detection, she crept in and out of the flat like a member of the French Resistance in war-torn Paris.
Before Crouch End became gentrified in the 1980s and long before the hedge funders and media types moved in with their skinny lattes and pavement cafés, the area was predominantly bedsit land. The only eateries I can recall were a couple of caffs, a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a kebab shop. Our lifeline out of the place was the 41 bus, an unreliable and intermittent service. I believed it was the stuff of legend, a vehicle that only appeared when the moon was full and a mist lay low on the ground, to be driven wildly through the streets of Crouch End by a headless driver.
I spent hours stood at that bloody bus stop on Crouch End Hill, silently willing a 41 to suddenly appear from around the corner. When the damn thing eventually did creep up the hill it was impossible to lose your temper with the clippie. She was one of the old brigade who wouldn’t have put up with any lip anyway, one that my aunty Chris would’ve approved of: in her sixties, immaculately made up and smartly dressed in a neatly pressed uniform with a gossamer-fine hairnet dotted with tiny beads covering her neatly waved blue hair.
After my initial prejudice towards Crouch End wore off I found that I quite liked the place. It had a village atmosphere; in fact Kate used to say when she came to see us that it was like visiting relatives in the country. One of the first things I did on moving into the flat was to join the library. They had a pretty good local history section, which was handy as I’ve always had a passion for local history. Fuelled by what I’d read, every Sunday Angela and I would explore nearby Alexandra Palace, Waterlow Park and my favourite, Highgate Cemetery.
One book that I’d read was about the Highgate Vampire and I was very taken by the tale of supposed sightings of a vampire in the west part of the cemetery. The story caused quite a fuss when it broke in the early seventies. Huge crowds gathered in Swains Lane after ITV televised a live interview with Eamonn Andrews, of all people, and a couple of vampire hunters.
I could well believe that vampires existed among the vandalized headstones and overgrown crypts. The decaying angels and the marble faces that embellished the ornately carved tombs, taking their final bows before the all-suffocating ivy finally enveloped them for eternity, certainly fired my imagination. The entrance to the magnificent Egyptian Avenue is pure D. W. Griffith, the perfect setting for a scene out of his 1914 silent film Judith of Bethulia.
One of the most disturbing aspects of Highgate Cemetery was the lengths that vandals and would-be ‘worshippers of the occult’ had gone to and the desecration that they’d inflicted. The Victorians buried their dead with some
very nice pieces of jewellery, worth a fortune or so the legend went. Consequently the tombs were smashed and the coffins inside forced open, their mummified contents ransacked and left hanging over the side, grinning obscenely at us. Hammer Horror couldn’t compete. I took these images home with me, we both did, and we became so obsessed by the Highgate Vampire and the fear that he might just pay us a nocturnal visit that we pushed the beds together and sprinkled a circle of salt around them to protect us.
Vera and Ryan had come down from Liverpool for the weekend. I hadn’t seen Ryan for a while and now felt uncomfortable in his presence, rejecting any amorous advances and treating him as if he were a plague of cockroaches. I’d moved on, or so I thought, and Ryan was history. Vera, on the other hand, I’d missed and I encouraged him to make the move and come and live with us.
Angela and I seemed to go to a lot of parties. There was always someone in her drama school having a ‘do’ and Lozzy’s friend over in south London was forever throwing parties in her flat in Victoria Mansions. Apart from the partying we lived a fairly frugal lifestyle. We had to, we were permanently skint. Angela was barely getting by on her student grant and I found it impossible to live on what I earned at the hospital, so I looked for a part-time bar job. After all I was well qualified.