by Paul O'Grady
At the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, in what felt like a rough part of sarf London, the acts who performed there worked on the bar. Some of them shot up and down it fearlessly on roller skates, whereas I was a little more cautious and tottered gingerly along in my saloon girl’s outfit, miming to Madeline Kahn’s ‘I’m Tired’ from Blazing Saddles. There was a bit of a Wild West saloon feel to the place anyway. The crowd were rough and ready and looked as if they were more than capable of eating their young alive. The dressing room was a rat-hole and if you didn’t fancy strutting your stuff atop the bar then there was a swing for you to show off on. It was exhilarating swinging higher and higher over the heads of the crowd, and above the noise I could hear Joyce from behind the curtain muttering to our dresser, ‘She’s going to kill herself out there.’
I’ve read a few articles over the years about how the Royal Vauxhall Tavern was once a famous music hall where the likes of Marie Lloyd frequently performed, and even how Queen Victoria once paid a visit (hence the Royal) en route to the palace. Although it’s built on the site of what was the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens the tavern has no such romantic past, starting out as a humble lorry-drivers’ pub until the sixties, when the landlady jumped on the drag boom bandwagon and started putting on acts to entertain the mainly heterosexual working-class audience. It hadn’t changed much since then apart from the audience, who, while still being very working-class, were now mostly passengers on the lavender bus. Neither had the decor altered much over the years. I thought it was a dump. South London seemed like another country compared to Crouch End and I didn’t particularly care if I never set foot in the Vauxhall again. Little did I know that it was to become my spiritual home for over ten years and that in time I would learn to love every brick in the place.
If I thought the Vauxhall Tavern was bad, then nothing could prepare me for the Elephant and Castle pub over the road. It’s now one of those ubiquitous Starbucks coffee shops and I wonder if the clientele have any idea of the building’s history as they sip their caffè lattes. The Elephant and Castle, or the Elephant’s Arsehole as I came to call it, was without doubt one of the sleaziest pubs in London. The patrons of this watering hole were a ragbag assortment of drunks from the doss house next door and hard-bitten rent boys and their dubious punters. There were frequent fights and it was said that if you’d been barred from every other pub in London then the Elephant and Castle would be more than happy to accommodate you. Sat at the end of the bar, an incongruous figure among such lowlife, was a smartly dressed middle-aged lady in a neat little suit with pearls at her throat and a head of nicely waved hair, ever so ‘refeened’. She acted if she were running an elegant hotel bar, apparently oblivious to the winos and down-and-outs staggering around her as she dispensed bonhomie with the charm of the chairperson of the Harrogate Rotary Club. There was no dressing room; in the Elly you got changed in the none too clean ladies’ lav and the odd ladies (and I mean odd) who used it always, and quite rightly I realize now, berated us for being there.
‘Take it up with the management,’ Joyce would tell them, fighting me for space in the tiny mirror over the sink, ‘and shut the door please if you’re going to have a slash. We can see what you’ve had for your dinner.’
A further black spot on the Elly’s copy book was the reduction in fee. ‘We can’t afford to pay as much as our competitors as we are a much smaller establishment, but we can guarantee you regular bookings,’ the Annie Walker clone would say, smiling sweetly as she handed us our twenty-quid fee for the night.
I hated working at the Elly. It was the last chance saloon, the end of a road that I hadn’t even started on yet, and I felt that we were finished before we’d begun as we stood there bumping and grinding to a bunch of uninterested losers. And yet, years later, the Elly was to be the birthplace of Lily Savage. It was there that I first abandoned the tape and found the courage to pick up the microphone and talk.
It was in a record shop in King’s Cross called Mole Jazz that I first heard Brenda Lee’s unique recording of ‘Saved’ complete with the opening of ‘Bringing In The Sheaves’ – and had an epiphany. In a blaze of light I could see a vision in which both Joyce and I were dressed as Salvationists, me as the fallen woman newly reformed after a life of drink and debauchery and rejoicing that she’d been ‘Saved’ and Joyce bringing up the rear as the chorus, going hell for leather with a tambourine. I rushed home to make a tape.
I would come on in an old kimono and a wig full of rollers, clutching a gin bottle, to Phyllis Diller’s version of ‘One For My Baby And One More For The Road’ and at the denouement, when I eventually collapsed from a combination of grief and drink, Joyce would appear dressed in the uniform of the Salvation Army, complete with bonnet, to Julie Andrews’s rendition of the hoary old music-hall lament ‘She’s More To Be Pitied Than Censured’. Then I would join her in a uniform of my own for ‘Saved’. Perfect except for one thing. Just where does one go to get a Salvation Army outfit?
Shamelessly I gathered up the kids I was looking after and took them with me on the bus to Denmark Hill and the William Booth Memorial Training College, the very heart of the Salvation Army. My plan was simple. I worked for social services, the kids would prove that, and one of the centres where I worked was putting on an amateur production of Guys and Dolls and we needed to borrow a couple of uniforms for the larger lady. I didn’t like lying to them at all – the Catholic guilt really kicked in and I was full of remorse – but I needed two Salvation Army outfits and I could hardly say I wanted them for a drag act, now could I?
I left the children waiting in the large, airy reception while a squeaky-clean young male officer escorted me to a room upstairs. I felt the kids gave me the air of a Maria von Trapp and I nearly burst into a chorus of ‘I Have Confidence’ as I skipped up the stairs after Officer Squeaky Clean. The officer who interviewed me was sweeter than Snow White and gave me a selection of ancient uniforms to look through. I chose two of the largest, hoping they would fit us, and a couple of bonnets and left a donation of fifty quid that I hoped would atone for my sins.
Returning to the reception area, I found the children drinking orange juice and eating biscuits supplied by the saintly Officer Squeaky Clean. ‘You do a very good job,’ he told me kindly, which made me instantly feel like the biggest piece of shit that ever slid across a pavement.
I really do have the greatest admiration for the Salvation Army. I’ve seen at first hand the remarkable work they do and since that autumn afternoon in 1979 I’ve always made the odd donation. Once a Catholic, eh?
Joyce howled with laughter when he saw the uniforms, which were falling to bits and stank of mould. Mine looked as if it had been around since the First World War but apart from being a little short in the arm they were a reasonable fit. Chrissie patched them up and made a few alterations and we launched the new act at a pub called the Nashville in Hammersmith that same night. It went down a storm and for the first time since we’d started out we left the stage to the satisfactory sound of deafening applause. As a finale Joyce stripped off his uniform and bonnet to reveal a minuscule gladiator’s outfit underneath that Chrissie had thrown together out of half a yard of black leatherette, a tin of gold model paint and a few studs and chains, and swapping his tambourine for a bugle he launched into ‘You Gotta Get A Gimmick’ from the musical Gypsy.
After a quick change I joined him in another of Chrissie’s five-minute creations: a set of pink chiffon moths’ wings attached to a tiny sequined bra from which two strategically placed tassels hung limply. Covering my crotch and my modesty was an oversized sequin butterfly fashioned out of an old pair of tights and a wire hanger, again with a tassel that swung between my legs. It would take a general anaesthetic to get me to put on something like that ‘costume’ today in private, never mind in public, but I didn’t give a damn then and even had the nerve to go out to a club in it afterwards.
John Gleason, the affable Irish landlord of the Nashville, liked to book two acts for his Wedne
sday night cabaret. It was a great pub to work in. The stage was huge and lit by a professional lighting rig and the dressing room, surprise, surprise, was a decent size and fit for human habitation. We shared the bill that night with a mime act called Stage Three: Jimmie, John and David, known in certain circles as Elsie, Connie and Miss Hush. Don’t ask.
David, aka Miss Hush, was the brains behind the act. An inventive window-dresser by day, he designed and made all the costumes and elaborate feather headdresses, styled the wigs and not only painted his own face each night but did the other two as well. Hush’s make-up was a work of art. He took his time applying slap as it was a ceremony he enjoyed. He would pause every five minutes for a fag and a hefty swig of ‘the baby’, half a litre of Coke mixed with half a bottle of vodka. Hush never went to a booking without stopping at an off-licence en route. ‘Just pull over here a minute, will you, wench, while I pop in the offy for the baby.’
Hush’s speciality was to strip to ‘Put The Blame On Mame’ dressed in a wig and costume identical to the iconic black satin one worn by Rita Hayworth in the film. He really was extraordinarily glamorous – he literally oozed glamour – and you’d never think that the big bloke in the checked shirt and jeans was the same person as the smouldering redhead slowly removing her shoulder-length glove on stage. Like Joyce, his bulk made him look curvy and voluptuous whereas I just looked like a long streak of piss.
Hush also spoke a different language. ‘I’m just going to the bar to collect the handbag’ translated as ‘I’m off to collect the night’s fee.’ Wigs were shyckles and an offer of ‘getting a nice bit of jarry down the screech at the latty’ meant ‘come to our house for your tea.’ Elsie spoke the same lingo only more fluently. He was the oldest of the trio, bossy and opinionated with a pronounced lisp, and referred to himself in the third person as ‘yer mother’.
‘Yer mother don’t tell no liesh, babesh, but I’ve seen better nets hanging in a window,’ he once said to me, alluding to the net coat that the drag queen on stage was wearing as a tribute to Dorothy Squires. Elsie was very possessive of ‘Dot’ and whereas other acts who impersonated the fiery Welsh singer would send her up, invariably staggering on stage pretending to be drunk and waving a bottle of Gordon’s gin, Elsie’s Dot was delivered straight as a tribute to his idol. Since Hush’s day job as a window-dresser meant he had access to all manner of goodies, feathers in particular, Elsie’s Dot Squires gown was magnificently trimmed in yards and yards of luxurious white ostrich feathers tipped with turquoise, courtesy of a window display at Allders in Clapham. Elsie closed his eyes and literally shook with emotion as he mouthed the words to Dot’s dramatic rendition of ‘Till’, every last one of those turquoise-tipped feathers quivered in unison, putting me in mind of a little plump quail going about the delicate process of laying an egg.
I liked Elsie, he was a real character and very funny, and it was he who encouraged Joyce and me to join him and the rest of the gang at the Escort Club in Pimlico. On admittance you were given a paper plate with a solitary lettuce leaf and a slice of luncheon meat to get round the licensing laws’ requirement that the club serve each patron a meal.
It’s commonplace now to see a troupe of drag queens parading through the streets but back in’79 it was quite brave to walk around brazenly in drag on a Wednesday night, particularly if you were dressed as a moth. We stopped the traffic as we sashayed across the road and into the club. I ended up getting hammered and falling off my bar stool, as you do when you’ve drunk your body weight in cider. I managed to kick Joyce in the back, sending him rolling down a couple of steps and sliding across the dance floor like a large sequined stone in a game of curling.
‘I’m going to knack you,’ he roared from his position on the floor, picking his wig up and slamming it hastily on his head back to front. ‘And just look at me good purple, it’s destroyed,’ he bellowed with dismay on discovering the large tear in his brand new purple sequined frock.
I’d finally conceded that the lime-green fishtails with the music notes were hideous. Thanks to the nice little man in the West End, I came home with a bale of purple sequined fabric that Chrissie transformed into two evening gowns. Joyce’s good purple had been his pride and joy and now it was ruined. I flapped me wings and got out of Joyce’s way double smart and hid in the lavs until mercifully Hush stepped in, offering to repair the frock. And so, when the club closed, off we trooped to their house in Purley, a tiny whitewashed two-bedroom cottage on the main Purley Road that one day Vera, Joyce and I would move into. Six drag queens and Vera. Now there’s a title for a sitcom …
The owner of the house we’d rented a flat in for nearly three years suddenly decided that his tenants were responsible for the rates – not just the current ones but also for the two years that he was in arrears. This left us with a rent that was unaffordable. We fought him with the help of the Citizens Advice Bureau but, as so frequently happens, the little guys lost and as we couldn’t and wouldn’t pay the astronomical rent increase our landlord served us with eviction papers. I’d hoped to get a few months’ grace before he slung us out by the devious means of taking him to a gay club and getting him drunk. Then I’d chat him up and get him to change his mind. That was the plan. However, pissed as a fart and overcome with passion (and who would blame him?), he made a clumsy lunge at me, sticking his tongue in my ear in a gesture of wanton lust. When guilt overcame him and he thankfully retracted it, he would slump to his knees, dragging Vera and me with him for a bout of prayer and self-flagellation, right there in the middle of the Rainbow Rooms, Manor House.
Finding an affordable flat in an accessible location in London at short notice is asking the impossible. We’d scanned the Evening Standard and Time Out to no avail, and with less than a week to go before the landlord sent in the bailiffs we still hadn’t found anywhere to live.
Desperate times call for desperate measures and I went in search of a key I still had somewhere that belonged to the flat of an elderly client who had died over a year earlier. She was very old and sick and the hospital, realizing that they could do no more for her, sent her home to die in her own bed. As she had no living relatives and no one to care for her, the job of looking after her in those final days was left to me and a home help.
It was a small flat, just one room with a tiny kitchen and bathroom, and each time you turned the gas on for the oven or ran a bath the walls and windows ran with rivers of condensation.
Edna, the lady in question, had been an orphan. She went straight from the orphanage into domestic service as a nanny and a life sentence of caring for a succession of rich people’s progeny. Dotted around on top of the mantelpiece in cheap gilt frames were old black and white photographs of these children to whom she’d given so much of herself, and yet here she was at the end of her long life, alone apart from a total stranger in a damp little bedsit in Camden, waiting to die. It was sobering stuff sitting with her in the wee small hours of the morning, listening to her shallow breathing growing weaker and the constant tick of her bedside clock counting down the hours.
Before she died, Edna told me that there was a little money wrapped in an old sheet in her wardrobe drawer that she’d like me to have. She explained that since she had nobody else to leave it to she’d like me and the home help to share it. I took no notice at the time as she was saying a lot of things that didn’t make sense; only that morning she’d called me Maud and asked if I’d laid the nursery table for the children’s breakfast.
Edna died peacefully at three in the morning. She’d woken up and asked me if I’d warm her some milk and when I returned from the kitchen she was dead.
There’d been a spate of deaths since the nights had drawn in. A few weeks prior to Edna’s death, I’d let myself into the home of an elderly gent and found him lying dead on the hall floor, with his arm outstretched, grinning obscenely. But that was small fry compared to the morbidly fascinating tale of the old lady who was discovered burned alive in her kitchen in King’s Cross. Sh
e had just lit the gas and was about to put the kettle on for a cup of tea when she’d had a stroke. That was bad enough, but unfortunately for this poor woman the plate rack over the stove combined with the recess wall had held her upright, positioning her over the stove in such a way that the flames from the gas ring slowly roasted her alive, burning through her chest. Rivers of fat had bubbled out of the charred hole in the back of her cardigan to cover the kitchen floor. The smell was disturbingly similar to that of frying bacon and for a very long time afterwards quite a number of Peripatetics couldn’t even consider a bacon butty without retching.
Thankfully Edna’s death was in nowhere near as traumatic. I understood what people meant when they said that loved ones had ‘just slipped away’, for that was what Edna had done, tranquil and untroubled. I covered her with the sheet and then went round to the phone box to ring the police and an ambulance, who, judging by the amount of time they took to turn up, put the collection of an old woman’s corpse at the bottom of their list of priorities. Surprisingly, considering the Exorcist saga when I’d jumped into bed with my ma because I was scared to sleep in my own bed, I didn’t mind being alone with Edna’s body. She was a nice old girl and if I did feel the jitters creeping up on me I reassured myself that, as she wouldn’t have harmed a fly in life, there was little chance of her suddenly rising from under the sheet reincarnated as a flesh-eating zombie hell-bent on ripping my throat out. Nevertheless I opened the front door to let some air in and watched her from the safety of the front step just in case she moved.
As I smoked my fag I noticed that the sheet over her was covered in stains. Resignedly I went in search of a clean sheet, not wanting the police and ambulance services to think she’d been neglected and allowed to lie in a dirty bed. As I was getting a clean sheet out of the wardrobe drawer I had a look to see if there really was any money hidden. I was sceptical but underneath the bedding I felt something very much like a wad of notes. Pulling the bundle out, wrapped in a towel just as Edna had said, I sat back on my heels with the blood pounding in my ears. How much was here? It could be thousands, millions even, although I doubted it as the wad really wasn’t that big.