The Milkman's On His Way

by David Rees

  Growing up gay, beginning as a teenager to realise what you are. Just when everyone else is becoming involved with the opposite sex, you’re alone in having to hide your feelings. It’s impossible to talk to anyone. It’s not something you want to blurt out to your parents, your teachers - or the boy you fancy. The only salvation is to find people like yourself. And that’s a big step. A very big step...

  Teenager Ewan Macrae’s progress to a positive gay identity is told with a sensitive frankness in this bestselling novel.

  The best fictional guide for gay youth that has yet appeared - IDENTITY.

  Quite simply, it's one of the most important works of gay fiction to emerge for some time. A more convincing portrayal of gay coming-of-age isn't to be had - MISTER.

  Cover Art by Francis D’Arcy

  A native of Devon, David Rees is the author of many novels, including some for young people, and of several works of literary criticism. In 1978 he won the Carnegie Medal for The Exeter Blitz, and in 1980 The Other Award for The Green Bough of Liberty. His other books published by GMP include The Hunger and The Estuary.

  David Rees

  First published March 1982 by Gay Men’s Press, P.O. Box 247,London N15 6RW

  Fourth impression 1989

  Copyright © 1982 David Rees.

  British Library/Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Rees, David

  The milkman’s on his way.

  I. Title

  823’ 914[F] PR6058.E/

  ISBN 0 907040 12 8

  The quotation on p.6 is from W.H. Auden, Collected Poems (ed. Edward Mendelson), and is reproduced with kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. (UK) and Random House Inc. (US).

  For Chris Heaume

  About suffering they were never wrong,

  The Old Masters: how well they understood

  Its human position; how it takes place

  While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

  W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

  One: The Meningitis Summer

  Two: The Linga Longa Cafe

  Three: The Fairground Summer

  Four: First Love

  Five: The Diary

  Six: The Swimming-Pool Summer

  Seven: Coming Out

  Eight: James

  One: The Meningitis Summer

  The summer I was fifteen I had meningitis. I don’t know how I contracted the disease, but a few days before I became ill Leslie and I had been poking around in a drain at the back of the shop where his mother worked. She had seen a rat scuttling into it. Mum was convinced that was the cause, but I’m not sure she’s right: Leslie didn’t get meningitis. I was unconscious a lot of the time, and when I wasn’t, I was vomiting and experiencing headaches so painful I sometimes screamed aloud. While Leslie was on the beach, swimming, surfing, and giving himself a superb suntan over as much of his body as he dared to expose. Which meant there wasn’t much trace of white! But his good luck and my aches and agonies aren’t the reason I’m starting here; it’s because during my illness I noticed something about my mother I hadn’t been aware of previously. ‘That we should suffer this!’ she said to me one morning. The pronoun was peculiar, I thought, a few minutes later when the remark had sunk in: it was I who was suffering. And I remembered she had said more or less the same thing twice before, but in my fever the words had floated over me and not registered.

  When she brought to my bedside some little delicacy she had cooked, broth or an egg custard or a milk pudding — foods the doctor had said I would be able to keep down — and I refused to touch them because even the suggestion of something to eat was utterly nauseous, the hurt she obviously experienced made me feel so guilty that I tried to swallow a spoonful just to please her. And immediately threw up.

  ‘What can I do?’ she asked on one of these occasions, as she mopped the sick from my chin and my lips. ‘What more can I do? I’ve tried everything!’

  I closed my eyes, wishing she would go away. It was easier for me, she seemed to be hinting, than it was for her: all I had to do was lie there while she suffered helplessly.

  I thought about this, on and off, during the next few weeks as I recovered and took my first shaky steps out of doors, and walked for the first time since my illness down to the beach and watched Leslie laughing in the sea. Some heavy responsibility had been laid on me; I had discovered some tangled knot in the web of feeling that existed between us, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe my purpose, in her view, was to bring her joy, pride, and achievement: sorrow was prohibited. Leslie came running across the sand. The smooth golden skin, the muscles that worked in every part of his body seemingly without effort, even the long fair hair made me envious. After my sickness I was pitifully thin and white; it would take years, as it so happened, to recover that lost flesh — but I was also aware that I admired his appearance too: he was strikingly good-looking. I felt a shiver inside. Of pleasure; but also ill omen, as if a cloud had just blotted out sunlight. I knew, at that moment, that I’d bring my mother more sorrow than joy, though what the nature of that sorrow might be I hadn’t the faintest idea.

  I remembered that when she had brought me that broth, that egg custard, she had been wearing her rings. As people do in moments of drama or ceremony, a friend’s wedding, or on board a sinking ship while waiting for rescue.

  But we got on well enough. As well as any teenage kid gets on with his mum, which meant our only arguments were over coming in at night later than she said I should. And riding on the back of Little Michael’s motorbike: areas of behaviour in which she thought I’d hurt myself or be killed. But Dad said nothing. And when he found out that I’d been in pubs with Leslie, that I smoked cigarettes occasionally, he simply remarked that as long as I paid for my own pleasures he didn’t mind; I was old enough, in his opinion, to decide whether I wanted to rot my lungs with tobacco smoke or not. And going to discos with girls — well, that was all right too. Not that I spent every one of my free hours indulging in such activities: I liked the company of my parents. Helping Dad with the garden or with jobs round the house was fun: I enjoyed working with him and chatting about nothing in particular.

  Dad is a milkman. He’s luckier than some; he doesn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to start his job. Eight a.m. he begins. Not in the town; it’s a country route — all the little villages and outlying cottages south-east of Bude. Some of the people don’t get their milk till four o’clock in the afternoon, which is a bit silly when you remember they live, many of them, a stone’s throw from a farm. But that’s how it is these days: the farmer milks the cows at the crack of dawn, a lorry transports the stuff to the dairy, it’s processed and bottled, then Dad takes it back, half a day later, to people who live on the other side of the hedge from the field where the cows are eating the grass. Progress, Dad sarcastically calls it: modernisation, efficiency. When I was younger I used to go with him, during the holidays when I had nothing better to do, or if he needed a helping hand. He doesn’t like the work very much. ‘When you trot off into the big wide world and earn your own living,’ he often said, ‘make sure it’s got more prospects than this. This is a dead-end job.’ Strange. I’ve always found it quite pleasant. No boss breathing down your neck; and the countryside early on a summer morning is, as far as working conditions are concerned, as satisfying as anything one could want.

  I got teased about it at school, however; that year the old song Lullaby of Broadway was revived and zoomed up the charts. When the kids saw me coming they’d call out ‘The milkman’s on his way!’ which they seemed to think was very funny; then they’d quote things from the adverts on telly, like ‘Don’t forget your daily pinta!’ and �
��Are you getting enough?’ That last remark especially annoyed me, as the first time I heard it the sexual implication made me blush bright red. If you’re pale, and have freckles and gingerish brown curls as I have, you’ll know that blushing makes you look much more embarrassed than if you’ve got a dark skin and jet black hair. So of course they said that more often than the other comments. I wasn’t, as it happens, getting enough in that sense; indeed I wasn’t getting anything at all. Nor were they. But we’d reached the age when we talked about it a great deal, Leslie in particular. Any good-looking girl we passed on the road or saw on the beach, he’d stare after her and say it shouldn’t be allowed, such temptation. To me, he seemed obsessed, as if he was walking around with a non-stop erection three miles high. I was puzzled: girls didn’t have that effect on me at all. Which bothered me slightly. They ought to have some effect; I could see that, because all the other boys reacted like Leslie, even if they didn’t say as much as he did. But I was re-assured a little when I read in a book that people didn’t necessarily develop in that way at the same speed.

  After I had recovered from my illness and was more or less fit enough to lead a normal life again, I found a change in people’s relationships. When Leslie and I weren’t doing things on our own we went around with four other boys — John Anderson, Alan Carter, John Whitton who was called Bookworm John to distinguish him from the other John, and little Michael Wade who was a year older than we were and more or less our leader as he had a motorbike. John Anderson was called Wimpy John because he’d just started work at the local Wimpy bar; he was also a year older. Bookworm John wasn’t really a bookworm. He’d been given that nickname after we’d found him in the school library one day browsing through Plato’s Symposium. He’d been reading it, he assured us, not because he was remotely turned on by the Ancient Greeks, but because someone had told him it was all about sex. Very disappointing too, he added; it only described poofs, men having sex with other men. He put it back on the library shelf. I didn’t bother to look at it. It hadn’t occurred to me, then, that the subject-matter was something I’d find, later, of enormous importance and interest.

  What I found had changed was that instead of talking about women, the others had actually taken some practical steps in that direction. We were still a gang, but it had doubled in size. There were six girls: Molly, Juicy Lucy, Linda, Adrienne, Karen, and Louise. Everyone was more or less paired off, Molly with Alan, Michael with Lucy, Leslie with Linda. Adrienne and Karen, who were best friends, were supposed to be with the two Johns, though it seemed fairly clear that they weren’t really ready for this sort of thing: they preferred to spend their time giggling with each other rather than being alone with Bookworm or Wimpy. Which left Louise. Who was meant to be for me, I assumed. She didn’t look any more or less attractive than the other girls. A bit on the fat side, with big dark eyes.

  We’d go to the beach and the cinema, all twelve of us, but mostly, in the evenings, because there was nowhere else and none of us had any money, we’d sit in John’s Wimpy bar, trying to make a cup of coffee stretch out for an hour without being forced to buy another. We’d leave, not in a bunch, but in twos. On the way home, I’d put my arm round Louise and kiss her. Not particularly because I wanted to — it never, once, excited me — but because it was expected. She expected it, and doubtless all the others were doing it, and. . . hadn’t everything we’d ever talked about or read or seen on the telly or in the cinema suggested that this was normal and desirable; what all girls and boys wanted? But to me it was a very over-rated pastime. Dead boring.

  Leslie, when I saw him on his own, talked incessantly about Linda. How far she’d let him go. (Almost nowhere, it seemed.) When he asked me about Louise, I was very evasive. But I admitted, eventually, that we had done nothing, and that the idea of doing so didn’t particularly fill me with uncontrolled sexual desire.

  He stared at me. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘Are you queer or something?’

  Was I? I wondered if it might be possible, but I tried to push the idea out of my head: it was too awful to consider. I’d never met anybody who was, and a queer to me was a figure of fun, pathetic and silly, like Mr Humphreys on Are You Being Served? I didn’t want to be like that. I wasn’t like that! But what was I? I didn’t know. If I was a poof it would be the end of the world. I’d have to hide it from my parents and all my friends. I’d never do anything about it, not in a million years! Then I thought of Louise with no clothes on, of the two of us making love. The image was repellent, so totally undesirable that just the idea of it made me feel physically ill. I glanced at Leslie. He was a damn sight better-looking than Louise. And I started to imagine me and Leslie. . .

  I went back to the book that said people developed at different speeds. Homosexuals, it told me, were sick people who, even if society unjustly persecuted them, were perpetually unhappy and dissatisfied. But on one point I felt re assured: all teenagers, it said, went through a homosexual phase. It was part of the turmoil of adolescence. That must be it, I decided. A healthy interest in girls would come later. It didn’t occur to me that this little sex manual — written especially for young people, and given to me by my parents — might be wrong on all these counts, though I did have enough intelligence to hesitate over the statement about all teenagers going through a homosexual phase. Everybody I knew, boys and girls, appeared to have taken to heterosexual behaviour as ducks to water. Or were they having similar problems to mine, but hiding them so cleverly that the rest of us had no inkling? It was unlikely. None of my friends was capable of being as secretive as that. Or were they? But I kept my anxieties very much bottled up inside. Leslie? Impossible! Perhaps it was just some people, not everybody as the book said. Though why the hell did it have to be me?

  But life wasn’t one long round of worry. I quite enjoyed Louise’s company, and she was not all that bothered, as far as the physical side of the relationship was concerned, that I didn’t want to do anything more than hold hands or kiss her goodnight. In fact, she was rather relieved. Perhaps all the girls would have been relieved: Linda, certainly, wasn’t ready for more than that. Which caused arguments and tension between her and Leslie. Maybe, I began to think to myself, I was better off than he was. It was fun, the gang of us, going around together. Having a girl-friend made me feel equal with the other boys, conferred on me a kind of status. Leslie, however, wasn’t interested in status; he couldn’t have cared less about the gang. For him, it was simply more pleasant than being alone. What he wanted was Linda to himself, just the two of them; but that situation, even if deep down she liked the thought of it, she considered dangerous.

  And there was school work to occupy my mind. With September our last year started, C.S.E. exams looming closer and closer as the months went by. My illness meant I had missed almost a whole term’s work. I tried hard to catch up. But I wasn’t very bright, academically, and I felt pretty certain I wouldn’t do well. Not well enough, that is, to escape the fate allotted to most teenagers in a place like Bude, which had no industries of any sort: unemployment. There wasn’t a factory for miles around. All you could hope for, if you weren’t brilliant, was a casual job in the cafes and hotels during the summer.

  Dad nagged me a little about this. ‘You ought to think carefully about what you want to do when you leave,’ he said.

  ‘I have thought,’ I answered. ‘But I don’t know whether there’s any choice.’

  ‘Mrs Davis’s son is doing very well,’ Mum said. ‘You know — Peter Davis. He left school last year, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. With five “O” levels.’ Peter Davis worked in a solicitor’s office. It was not the kind of job I wanted, indoors and deskbound, and Peter Davis, a dull, shy kid whose face was studded with acne, wasn’t a person I looked up to in any way.

  Mum sighed. ‘A great pity you never got onto the “O” level course,’ she said.

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ Dad came to my defence. ‘ “O” levels and all that sort of caper aren
’t suitable for everybody. Don’t give the boy an inferiority complex. He does his best.’

  ‘I am trying,’ I told her.

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ she said. ‘But I wish you hadn’t missed nearly a whole term last year.’

  ‘It couldn’t be helped.’

  ‘Be thankful he didn’t die,’ Dad said.

  I laughed. ‘I had no intention of snuffing it!’

  ‘Go on doing your best. That’s all we want.’

  Mum said that that was all she wanted too, but she didn’t sound so convinced. I felt close to my father at that time. During the Christmas and Easter holidays I helped him on his milk-round: we never talked about anything very much, nothing like the discussions and arguments I sometimes had with Louise or Leslie, but the hours passed pleasantly enough, dissecting last night’s TV programmes, or the strange lives of some of the people to whom we delivered the milk. Sometimes he’d mention Mum, never serious criticisms, but his remarks about her being too house-proud, or feeling scared of horses and pigs, or disapproving of the Benny Hill show, suggested that he and I, the males of the family, had a sort of alliance that might come in useful when feminine ideas and opinions went too far. And our silences — long and frequent — weren’t embarrassed black holes in the conversation, with both of us trying frantically to think of something to say, but were warm and companionable: we knew each other sufficiently well to know when it simply wasn’t necessary to talk.

  Dad read the Sun every day, mostly the sports section. He took it with him on his round, and sometimes I would find him ogling the girl on page three. ‘A right little cracker,’ he said on one occasion. ‘Isn’t she?’