by Paul O'Grady
Vera, not one to mince his words, especially when suffering from a crippling hangover, told him in no uncertain terms where to go, and swishing back into the flat slammed the door in his outraged face. Lionel happened to be a dyed in the wool, Bible-thumping, fully paid-up member of a more extreme branch of Christian fundamentalism. He also happened to be firmly entrenched in the back of the closet, his sexuality conflicting with his religious beliefs, making him, amongst other things, a troubled man constantly at odds with himself. He hated on sight what he saw as a foul-mouthed, mincing troublemaker flouncing about in women’s clothing in his hall. He marked Vera down as an evil influence over me and a drunken sodomite (his words), doomed to burn for ever in the eternal flames of Hell. I, on the other hand, was a paragon of virtue, one who was always polite and paid his rent on time, with the saintly qualities of a young Francis of Assisi. This infuriated Vera.
‘It’s not fair,’ he moaned. ‘He hates me and thinks the sun shines out of your arse because you put on the holier-than-thou act whenever he comes round. Just as well he doesn’t know what you’re really like.’
Just as well indeed. A mental image of the paragon banging the head of a gobby youth on the bonnet of a parked car outside the Showplace flashed before my mind. My growing concern over whether I would end my days in the service of Stavros and Alana had been alleviated the previous Saturday night when two lads swaggered into the bar, a pair of morons who should never have been allowed into a gay club. Predictably, after they’d gained a little Dutch courage from a few drinks, they started to verbally abuse the other customers, Vera in particular. Now Vera had been the victim of mindless queer-bashing so many times it was turning into a career. Not so long ago he’d returned from a trip to Liverpool unrecognizable from the injuries sustained after three big brave men had used him for a spot of impromptu football practice outside a club, and I could see him growing understandably anxious feeling threatened in the face of further homophobia.
With the help of Theresa’s latest girlfriend, a tough but glamorous Essex gal, we threw these two goons out of the club but they lay in wait for us to finish work and then pounced on Vera as we left. That’s how I came to be banging a head on the bonnet of a car in the middle of the Finchley Road, not caring that passing cars were missing me by inches, deaf to the sound of their horns blaring, hearing only the sweet music that a cretin’s skull makes when bounced repeatedly on the bonnet of a Triumph Dolomite. Far from being supportive, Stavros, Alana and Peter blamed us entirely for the trouble and accused us of over-reacting, Peter even going as far as to slap Theresa’s girlfriend across the face when she confronted him.
Theresa and I never went back to work at the club after that night, and apart from running into her in a west London pub a few years later I never saw her again. We were married for twenty-eight years, one of the longest and happiest marriages in showbiz, until I finally got divorced in 2005.
The worry of now having no visible means of support was worth it for the sheer relief of being able to finally tell Stavros and Alana by means of the most mellifluous and inventive invective exactly what they could do with their job.
Considering I was allergic to all forms of housework I can only imagine that it was desperation that drove me to respond to an ad in the back of Time Out magazine proclaiming ‘Students! Earn fast cash cleaning private houses! Phone London Domestics …’ I went round for an interview with a young woman named Pat, who agreed to put me on the books for a trial period until I proved satisfactory. I was embarrassed to admit that I was an unemployed no-hoper so I concocted a cock and bull story about how I was a student studying to be a children’s illustrator. It was an interesting fantasy life that I conjured up for the benefit of Pat and the clients who bothered to speak to me, and one that was infinitely preferable to my current mundane existence. For the grand sum of a pound an hour plus tube fares, I got to clean the homes of the most pernickety and demanding women in London.
Mrs Taylor expected me to scrub every nook and cranny of her three-storey, six-bedroomed mansion in Golders Green in four hours with a five-minute break for a quick cup of tea. ‘Cleaner, elevenses,’ she’d shout up the stairs in the kind of rich plummy voice one imagined was reserved for garden parties on the manicured lawns of the homes on The Bishops Avenue, bestowing upon me a cup of tea as if it were the Order of the Garter. Mrs Goldfingel was an Orthodox Jewish woman who wore a shiny nylon wig pulled so low on her forehead it looked as if it was growing out of her eyebrows, and expected me to clean the grouting between every tile of her expansive bathroom with an old toothbrush and a tablespoon of Vim she’d parsimoniously doled out on to a saucer. These women and many others like them certainly expected their pound of flesh for a quid an hour but in time I grew cunning, only hoovering and dusting what you could see, and relying on little tricks such as a good squirt of Pledge in the mouthpiece of the phone to lead them to believe when they smelled it that they had a veritable ‘treasure’ in their employ, so thorough he even cleaned the phone.
I polished the piano on which Duke Ellington composed ‘The Single Petal Of A Rose’ in a smart little apartment off Park Lane, the home of Mrs Renee Diamond; carefully dusted the many artefacts belonging to John Auden, the explorer brother of W. H. Auden, and ran a mop over the lino in Dame Margot Fonteyn’s kitchen. One of my favourite clients was an indefatigable old lady, paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair, who lived in a chaotic two-roomed flat with a roll-topped bath in the kitchen, surrounded by hundreds of back copies of the Guardian and assorted musty dried twigs, flowers and mummified fruits arranged in a misshapen hand-thrown bowl she called Still Life. She liked me to spend my four hours taking her out shopping, and since she lived on the sixth floor of a block that had no lift it meant a terrifying descent, bouncing her cautiously in her wheelchair down each step, digging my heels in, terrified that I’d lose my grip and let her go. She was a heavy lady and getting her back up the stairs with a laden basket on her lap was near impossible. How I held on to her was nothing short of a miracle and I used to shake with both exhaustion and relief when we eventually reached the top in one piece. She’d been an artist in her youth, studying in Paris and Vienna, leading a bohemian lifestyle with a string of lovers. In the sixties she’d been involved in a motoring accident and in her own words ‘drove into the back of a stationary bus at great speed on the King’s Road, darling, and broke my spine.’ She still cruised up and down the King’s Road only this time in a wheelchair, reeking of 4711 cologne to mask the ever-present whiff of pee and living way beyond her means by spending her state pension on what she referred to as ‘little extravagances essential to life’ such as quail and oysters. Sometimes there was nothing left to pay me with and on occasions I’d even find myself having to lend her money.
In a nursing home in Regent’s Park I’d wash dishes in a scullery kitchen unaltered since the thirties. There was even a servants’ hall or ‘pugs’ parlour’, complete with a dark green chenille tablecloth covering the table and a bowl of waxed fruit in the middle. I half expected Rose to appear down the back stairs carrying a breakfast tray and announce to Mrs Bridges that Lady Marjorie would be out for lunch. There was a Rose but she was a much put-upon Irish woman, unable to relax even when eating, sitting on the very end of her chair ready to sprint into action at the command of Miss Carroll, the old curmudgeon who ran the home along the same lines as Captain Bligh did the Bounty. Despite her fearsome tongue I could never take Miss Carroll seriously due to her uncanny resemblance to Hylda Baker, forever heaving her bosom and patting the corkscrews of her wiry tangerine hair, which were always escaping their moorings of steel grips and sticking out in the way of springs in an old horsehair sofa.
As well as washing dishes I had to help the foul-tempered old chef (aren’t they all?) who had a gammy leg and couldn’t lift anything heavy, but without doubt the job I hated the most was cleaning the front steps. My face would burn with mortification whenever a smartly dressed young man of m
y own age passed by on his way to what I presumed was a wonderful job, convinced that they viewed me with pity as I scrubbed the steps on my hands and knees, my head bowed to hide my shame. On the upside you got a full half-hour break and a three-course lunch at the end of your shift, which was more than you got anywhere else, so I frequently volunteered to work the nursing home.
‘You ever waited on?’ Pat asked me one morning as I was collecting that week’s wages. I answered in the affirmative, neglecting to add that I was possibly the most inept waiter ever to spill food in a diner’s lap since Manuel in Fawlty Towers.
‘Well, there’s a chap here looking for a waiter to serve drinks at a private party in The Bishops Avenue. Do you think you could manage it?’
‘Pat,’ I replied indignantly, ‘you’re looking at someone who is Silver Spoon trained!’
‘I think you mean Silver Service,’ she said, smiling, rustling through some papers on her desk until she found a slip of paper with an address and phone number written on it. ‘He wants to speak first to whoever we send, so give him a ring but for God’s sake don’t mention the silver spoon.’
I rushed out of the office to the phone box over the road, had a quick fag while I prepared my speech, and rang the number.
‘Yes, this is Mr Adelman,’ the voice at the other end informed me in a thick middle-European accent, launching me into my self-promotional spiel.
‘Good, good,’ he said, after listening to this highly fictional CV. ‘But I must ask you. Are you a tolerant young man?’
I assured him that tolerance was my middle name.
‘Discreet?’
As a priest hearing confession. You wouldn’t get a peep out o’ me. There was nothing on this earth that could faze me.
‘Good, good,’ he said again, in a voice less anxious than previously. ‘In that case we’ll see you at six sharp.’
Chez Adelman turned out to be a Gothic mansion with a drive so long it should’ve had its own bus route. The door was answered by a dowdy middle-aged woman wearing a cheap striped dress and ill-fitting cardigan with a headscarf tied at the back of her head peasant-style who I assumed must be the maid.
‘Good evening. I’m your waiter,’ I said in a voice that I’d been practising and which I hoped made me sound like a professional.
‘Rear entrance,’ the maid replied in a weary voice, totally deflating my confidence as she shut the door in my face.
Fighting my way through the overgrown laurels to the back of the house I knocked on what I took to be the kitchen door and was eventually shown in by the same tired maid, who explained my duties to me.
‘There’s white wine and champagne in the fridge,’ she said, pointing to what looked like a set of steel double doors, ‘with plenty of red over there on the work surface. Should any of the officers require spirits you’ll find them in the pantry.’
‘Is it a military do then?’ I asked, trying to make small talk as she busied herself adding the finishing touches to a tray of food on the kitchen table.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘More of a small reunion for some of my husband’s oldest friends.’
Husband? This scruffy skivvy was the lady of the house? Jesus, my ma was right when she said real toffs didn’t waste money on clothes. We continued in silence and I was grateful when the front door bell rang. Mrs Adelman scuttled upstairs to answer it, flinging her cardigan off as she went and shouting for me to ‘bring some drinks up’ after her. I poured out a selection of drinks, helping myself to a hefty glug of champagne before placing the glasses on a tray and taking them upstairs. It was a gloomy house and I wove through the rabbit warren of oak panelling following the sound of voices which eventually led to the dining room. At first glance I thought that this must be a bizarre fancy dress party. A couple of women wearing the same striped outfit as Mrs Adelman were watching delightedly as an elderly man in a jacket and trousers made from identical fabric to the women’s licked the black leather jackboots of an equally decrepit SS officer. I hadn’t noticed the yellow star on Mrs Adelman’s dress before as her cardigan had hidden it from view, but seeing it now made me suddenly realize that the sinister theme of this little soirée was Nazis and Concentration Camp Victims. I stopped dead in my tracks, unsure of what to do or how to behave in such unsettling circumstances.
‘Would anybody like a drink?’ I heard my own voice saying as I shakily proffered my tray in the general direction of the group.
‘Ah, good evening, Paul,’ the man on the floor said, temporarily taking the heel of Himmler’s boot out of his mouth to smile up at me. ‘I’m Mr Adelman. Glad to see that you made it.’
‘Would you like a drink, Mr Adelman?’ My voice was beginning to make Minnie Mouse sound like a baritone.
‘Not until he’s finished polishing my boots,’ Himmler roared, adding something in German which made them all laugh. I mumbled something about getting more drinks and fled to the kitchen to have a drink and a fag while I assessed the situation. The money was good and I was only required to stay for two hours – obviously things spiced up as the evening progressed and they didn’t want me around to witness them, which suited me just fine. I could only guess at the history that spawned this peculiar reunion and the motives behind it, and the sight of two pensioners, one dressed in the uniform of the concentration camp and the other in full Gestapo drag, indulging in an act of sado-masochism on the dining room floor made me feel more than a little uneasy. However, it had taken two buses to get here and I was buggered if I was leaving without my money.
Judging by the number of times the front door bell had rung the party must be hotting up, and fortified by a couple of glasses of champagne I made my way back upstairs with a tray laden with drinks. If you ignored the fact that a lot of the male guests were dressed like extras from the History Channel’s Hitler in Colour and that a woman was bent across the knee of an SS officer having her bare buttocks repeatedly whacked with a riding crop to a chorus of cheers from enthusiastic onlookers, I could’ve been passing the drinks around at any other gathering in a wealthy north London house amongst a group of elderly guests enjoying an aperitif before dinner and bridge.
As I washed glasses in the kitchen I mulled over the antics above. If the Adelmans were Jewish, and I knew they were by the presence of a mezuzah on the front door frame, and assuming there was a possibility they might at some time have been prisoners in a concentration camp, why would they want to revisit the horrors of the past? If they had experienced the nightmare of Belsen or Dachau, how could they now be making polite small talk in their dining room with a group of people who quite possibly might have been their captors? The notion was disturbing to say the least and not something I wished to dwell on. ‘What they want to get up to is their own business,’ I told myself, knocking back another glass of champagne quickly as Mr Adelman came down the stairs with my wages. ‘Off you go now,’ he said, pushing fifty quid and a bottle of wine into my hand. ‘You’ve been marvellous.’ Fifty quid for two hours’ work! Jesus, at these prices I didn’t care if they started experimenting on each other on the dining room table. Letting myself out, I staggered down the drive, slightly squiffy, in search of a cab.
Mr Adelman rang the agency the next day and sang my praises, prompting Pat to send me on more catering jobs. Mrs So-and-So of Chelsea Park Gardens would recommend me to her friend in Overton Square who would then enthuse over the telephone to her friend in Eaton Place and pretty soon I’d built up a list of regular clients. I’d even cook if required, thanks to a former client in Holland Park who taught me how to prepare and serve a three-course meal. She was a smart American who quickly realized just how inept I was around a kitchen and dining room, and instead of getting rid of me took me in hand, teaching me how to wait at table and how to rustle up with comparative ease a succulent roast leg of lamb, a simple New York cheesecake and, as a starter, smoked haddock and spinach soufflé, meticulously timing the cooking of this unpredictable dish with the seating of the dinner guests to ensure th
at it would arrive at the table in all its inflated glory and not in a state of wizened collapse. Thanks to word of mouth again I was kept pretty busy in the neighbourhoods of Knightsbridge and Chelsea, serving up the same menu of soufflé, lamb and cheesecake to each respective client and their guests. Gene Wilder was at one dinner party. He was an affable fellah who didn’t seem to mind in the least when my slightly runny cheesecake slid off the serving spoon and, missing his plate, bounced off the table and on to his lap. ‘Jeez, Paul, and here’s me thinking you were a class act,’ was his only comment.
I was enjoying myself cooking and catering, growing more proficient with each job. Mary Holland, the original Oxo Katie, showed me that a little Bacardi whipped in with double cream could transform a trifle and that it was a lot easier if you chopped herbs by putting them in a mug and attacking them with a pair of scissors. Even so, I secretly wanted the security of a regular job – one with holiday pay and sick leave entitlement and tea breaks and dinner hours and, dare I admit it, some semblance of a routine. I’d written after all sorts of jobs, including one as a trolley-dolly for British Airways. At my first interview, held at Heathrow Airport (there were three to get through in all), I was weighed and told that my weight had to be in accordance with my height and that as I was underweight I had to gain at least eight pounds before my second interview in six weeks’ time. Each morning I religiously drank a pint of a hideous emulsion that professed to put meat on the bones of a cadaver, and every week I religiously weighed myself in the chemist’s on The Broadway and was pig sick when I discovered at the end of six weeks that instead of gaining weight I’d actually lost two pounds. I went into a deep sulk, muttering to myself as I made my way home about all those wasted mornings retching over the kitchen sink as I forced that foul concoction down my throat. Who wanted to be an air steward in a smart uniform flying all over the world to exotic locations anyway? The only bloody difference between serving drinks to the passengers of British Airways and handing out aperitifs in Mrs Leighton Hunt’s Mayfair drawing room was 35,000 feet.