A Young Man's Passage

by Julian Clary

  Nick lived near the school in Ealing with his father, whom he called ‘Bill Boy’. He was far more worldly wise than us, cooked his own meals, read Melody Maker and Record Mirror, watched television until gone midnight and showed a daring disrespect for the school rules. He was also very smart academically, ahead of the game in Latin and ancient Greek (which only a few of the brightest boys studied anyway), and funny, able to mimic classmates and monks, draw hilarious caricatures and slip in and out of an array of comic personas. Within days he’d given each monk and master a nickname. He also pointed out that ‘Father Fox’ – a smiling, somewhat fey monk – glided about silently as if his cassock concealed a set of wheels.

  I was delighted to discover it was possible to make fun of those in authority. It had never occurred to me before. Every time Father Fox glided by on lunch hour patrol duties, we would nod at each other knowingly and laugh. For a whole term we took to following him around like private detectives. I would follow him down one corridor while Nick loitered at the noticeboard, then he would take over. In our schoolboy eyes the man was simply touring all the school toilets in the hope of finding who knows what. We couldn’t do anything with this knowledge but we were certain we had his number.

  We were secretly laughing at everyone’s expense, not just the teachers. Parents, the goody-goody prefects, the bullies, the rugby types, the dimwits et al. We were ruthless. Everyone was caricatured and given a code name. We were in different classes, so we would save up incidents or anything we deemed a faux pas to tell each other in the break.

  An unfortunate-looking boy called Gallagher, who spoke as if he had a permanently blocked nose, was told off in my class once for wearing a bracelet.

  ‘But, sir,’ he cried, ‘them’s me love beads!’

  We howled over that one for weeks and it became our catchphrase of the moment.

  Pretty soon Barry Jones became the victim of our disdain. I don’t think he did anything in particular to deserve it, he just wasn’t quite on our wavelength. Nick and I so delighted in each other’s company that Barry got squeezed out. We were now exclusive to each other, turning on our weaker friend with all the cruelty of hungry pack dogs in the wild.

  Once Barry didn’t come to school for a couple of days, but we didn’t care.

  To the untrained eye we were model schoolboys, well spoken and well behaved. We observed the school rules, handed in our homework on time and kept ourselves nice. Until we ejected Barry, our private amusements were known to no one. Then one day Father Kasimir exposed me with such a torrent of invective that I wrote it down.

  Private Diary, 14 May 1973

  Today during RE class Father Kasimir turned to me and in a worked-up, loud voice said: ‘Oh yes! Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it? But underneath you are a filthy bully. Oh yes – I know! I suspected you all along. Oh, I’m disappointed in you, you great bully! You are like a rock with beautiful flowers over it but underneath is maggots and earwigs, filthy stinking earwigs!’

  Twice more in the class he said similar things. Then as I opened the door for him when he left, he said, ‘Come with me!’ and in the corridor said in a calm voice: ‘You know what I was talking about in there, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, father.’

  ‘Well, try and be nice to poor Jones. He’s been very ill you know, seeing special doctors and having nightmares. You didn’t know that, did you?’

  ‘No, father.’

  I did feel a pang of guilt for my old chum, but nightmares and ‘special’ doctors all seemed a tad overdramatic and unfortunately the whole episode lent itself rather well to our particular brand of parody. My friendship with Barry had run its course and no doctor, special or otherwise, could do much about it.

  Nick and I were now free to be best friends and neither of us had much time for anyone else. The fact that we were always together, whispering and giggling, didn’t go unnoticed. We became more overtly camp with each passing day. We started to be known throughout the school as ‘Daffodil and Daisy’, or ‘Pinky and Perky’, and cries of ‘Poof!’ or ‘Queer!’ were shouted by just about everyone whenever we were ‘in public’. Walking down a corridor from one classroom to another became a hazardous exercise, and as the years passed the persecution only increased, becoming more vehement, vocal and ultimately violent with each term.

  Then my mother gave me The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark to read, and the philosophy of the book’s heroine became our Bible. We saw ourselves as ‘la crème de la crème’, and when Miss Brodie told her girls to hold their heads ‘up, up like Sybil Thorndike’, we took her at her word. Miss Brodie championed individuality and eschewed conformity, and so would we. We drew parallels between the Brodie set and ourselves, between the Marcia Blaine School for Girls and the dull, stifling modus operandi of St Benedict’s.

  I struggled through maths and physics, yawned through history and geography, but I couldn’t wait for English. My very own Jean Brodie came in the shape of Frances Hanley. She was young and beautiful with flowing red hair and her classes were a joy to me. She let me exercise my imagination and was full of encouragement for the results, returning my essays to me peppered with big red ticks in the margins.

  She wasn’t at all stuffy, like the dusty old monks who taught most classes. And although our class was always quite noisy and a bit of a handful, she inspired us all, and was having none of my nonsense when I rather pompously wrote at the bottom of one essay: ‘The lack of imaginative sentences is probably due to the lack of silence I require for successful work.’

  She replied, ‘No, if you really want to concentrate you will do so. Besides, don’t try to stifle a little noise – it’s life, exuberance, real.’

  Most of the stories I wrote as a schoolboy feature strange, often mad, diva-like women, for example: ‘Mary Ross was outrageous. In everything she did she wanted to amaze; every head must turn in wonder at her, everyone must notice her. It is only when people point that she is happy.’

  On my end-of-term report she wrote: ‘The sky is his limit!’

  Love blossomed in the staff room for Miss Hanley and soon she married Philip Lawrence. When she left to have children I was devastated, and although I continued to do well in English, it wasn’t the same without her. Frances Lawrence used to bring a record player into class and tell us to write whatever the Enigma Variations suggested to us. Her replacement told us to write a story about ice hockey – not something within the scope of my experience. I ask you.

  My attempt survives.

  ‘OK, lads, put yer gear on.’ I went to my locker and got out my pads. I sat down on the bench beside Buddy Holder.

  ‘Looks like a hard one!’ he said, sucking his teeth then letting them go suddenly, making himself look very serious.

  ‘Oh, really?’ I said, pretending I didn’t know what he meant. He gave me an amazed, almost cross look and pulled his mask on.

  NICK HAD AN extensive record collection which I borrowed and absorbed. At that time David Bowie was in full throttle as Ziggy Stardust, and we started with him, soon branching out to the delights of Lou Reed, Dana Gillespie and Iggy Pop. Glam rock amused us too, and all of this served to give our already effeminate natures some credibility, at least to ourselves.

  Our greatest love was reserved for a number of soul divas. Aretha Franklin primarily, but Patti LaBelle, Linda Lewis and Thelma Houston were favourites too. Anyone loud and black got our approval.

  Our classmates were all into Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, music so far at the other end of the spectrum it only strengthened our resolve to have nothing to do with them.

  We were very excited when we heard that LaBelle were doing a concert in London, riding high on the success of their single ‘Lady Marmalade’, which contained the line, ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?’ The audience were instructed to wear something silver, so after my father dropped us off outside Drury Lane Theatre we rushed to the loo and stuck silver ‘merit’ stars all over our faces and thought we looked f
abulous. The show was a theatrical extravaganza, beginning with Patti LaBelle’s descent from the ceiling in a silver space-age costume, festooned in feathers, shrieking as only she could, and continuing with Nona Hendryx giving her all in ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. We were totally smitten: the dressing up, the emotion, the glamour of it all absorbed by our impressionable brains and incorporated into our day-to-day lives. We now knew there was a life outside school where childish name-calling and cane-wielding monks had no role.

  My head was similarly turned by visiting my sister Frankie in the chorus girls’ dressing room at Richmond Theatre after a performance of La Vie Parisienne, given by the Kingston Amateur Operatic Society: the make-up, the costumes, the excitement were all things I wanted to be a part of my life, too. Frankie soon became a professional dancer and I was fascinated by her new career and the contents of her wardrobe and make-up box.

  During her first job in panto, at Eastbourne, she started having a passionate affair with a guitarist in the band, and in her dressing-table drawer one day I found a stash of his intimate love letters. I rushed into school the next day to tell Nick of his specific request to ‘sit on my face’. This, of course, became our catchphrase of the week.

  The sex life of Frankie and Kevin we lived and breathed, recreating the private moments I had read about in the most explicit and disgusting cartoons. These we drew during the less engaging classes, folded and hid in the palm of our hands and swapped discreetly in the corridor between classes. Luckily our furtive communications were never spotted and confiscated or we’d have been in serious trouble, doubtless receiving the beating of Father G’s dreams.

  Apart from Frankie and Kevin, the cartoons featured Bill Boy and Big Bren (my mother) and a gallery of invented characters (Millie Slut, Gay Lusac, Rose Steptoe and Sambo, to name a few), saying and doing the most obscene things we could come up with. Schoolboy sexism and racism were commonplace. One I drew that Nick remembers featured a girl saying, ‘Oh, Sambo, I just love the way you pass chewing gum from your mouth to mine when you kiss me.’

  To which Sambo replied, ‘That ain’t chewing gum, honey chile, I just has de heavy cold.’

  In the cartoon fantasy world we created, Millie Slut and Gay Lusac were glamorous superstars, often depicted in full colour clutching awards for ‘the worst LP of the year’, falling into the orchestra pit during disastrous world tours or simply proclaiming their own fabulousness while dissing their rivals, sometimes pleasuring themselves with cucumbers at the same time.

  Meanwhile we did lots of extracurricular reading: Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, and Jane Austen, the gossipy nature of her novels being right up our street. When Father Edmund asked who had read any D.H. Lawrence novels and I replied, ‘Yes, all of them,’ he was horrified.

  ‘All of them? What, even . . . Lady Chatterley’s Lover?’ He was more horrified than impressed.

  Off we went to more concerts: Lou Reed, Roxy Music and in particular Dana Gillespie. She had just been signed to Bowie’s Mainman label and was doing a series of gigs to promote her album Weren’t Born A Man. (‘Ooh what a drag I ain’t got a tail to wag.’) The cover featured Dana in stockings and suspenders, wearing a red basque and a feather boa. She was the original Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar! and a former British waterskiing champion. She was fabulously buxom, reeked of jasmine oil and wore lots of Indian jewellery. We wrote to her and she replied, sending us each signed photos and stickers.

  We went to lots of her gigs at places like Brunel University and the 100 Club in Oxford St. She sang her own fabulously raunchy songs with titles like ‘Get My Rocks Off’ and concluded each gig with a selection of old bordello songs such as ‘Organ Grinder’, or a voodoo song from New Orleans ‘I Walk on Gilded Splinters’.

  She was also reasonably accessible. We got to chat to her afterwards, inhale her jasmine perfume, be photographed with her and get her autograph. Amazingly Nick once stayed the night at her ‘bunker’ in South Kensington, when he missed the last tube home. I was terribly jealous when I heard he’d snuggled up with Sneezy her Yorkshire terrier in the spare room, sleeping next to a guitar given to Dana by none other than David Bowie.

  After one gig I nipped onto the stage and nicked the glass she’d been drinking from to add to the ‘shrine’ I’d created in my bedroom.

  ‘I always thought you were gay,’ she said recently. ‘You had the mannerisms.’

  Indeed I did, but it wasn’t something I was ready to confront just yet. Dana was our icon. We had pictures of her in various states of undress on our bedroom walls. She was our icon, and in some senses our beard.

  FROM ADMIRATION TO aspiration is but a small step, and by the age of 14 Nick and I decided we were pop stars in the making. He was to be known as Nick Charles and I was Groupie Gypp. Until my father burnt it I wrote songs on the piano, but we both saved up for acoustic guitars and wrote dozens of songs each with just a handful of chords. I mastered A, E and G, but Nick rather surprised us both by playing the rather tricky B7. I even took guitar lessons with a clinically depressed woman called Wendy Beak who lived near Teddington Lock. Because of her condition she would only teach sad songs. Once ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ was learnt she wrote out the lyrics to ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’, except in her version it read:

  Somewhere over the rainbow,

  Skies are grey. . .

  We were prolific songwriters, knocking out a couple of what we were sure were hit singles most nights, with titles such as ‘Hot Hands, Cold Heart’, ‘Boogie Down The Inside of Your Leg’ or the sacrilegious ‘Love On The Altar’.

  We would each record our compositions separately on cassette, being as innovative as we could with our limited guitar skills, pitch pipes and maracas. We would then spend a Saturday afternoon having a ‘photo session’, which involved hogging the Woolworth’s photo booth in Richmond, wearing sunglasses and draping ourselves in colourful scarves. When Nick got a Polaroid camera for Christmas we were able to indulge our fantasy without suffering an angry queue of punters waiting to get their passport photos, impatient with the two girly schoolboys taking forever behind the grey curtain.

  We would then design our ‘album’ cassette covers, agonising over the felt-tip graphics and title (Eclipse and Sweet Touch were two of mine, the latter featuring a bastardised snap of me moodily stroking Pao the cat). When we were both ready we would ‘release’ our new albums, which just meant that I handed mine to Nick and he handed his to me. But we did this with some reverence and then nervously awaited each other’s ‘review’, which was invariably favourable.

  From time to time we’d put on concerts. We didn’t feature many of our own songs during these, preferring to sing along to the fuller sound of our favourite records. I’d wait till I knew everyone was going to be out for the evening, then I’d invite Nick over.

  Keeping our choice of songs secret from each other, we’d push back the furniture in the lounge, create a lighting effect of some kind by redirecting the angle-poise lamp towards the ceiling, then decide who was going to go first. If it was me I’d leave Nick sitting in the lounge while I went upstairs to get ready, donning a little make-up, some costume jewellery and a pre-chosen item from Frankie’s wardrobe, most famously a purple feather waistcoat my sister had made herself for a party.

  When I was transformed into Groupie Gypp, I’d call to Nick from the hallway, he’d start the first track and I’d make my dramatic entrance through the lounge door. I’d sing along to Aretha or Patti for half an hour, Nick would clap and whistle, then it would be Nick Charles’s turn to be the star. It was always necessary to keep half an ear cocked in case we heard the parents’ car on the driveway, in which case the performance had to be very suddenly aborted due to circumstances beyond our control.

  Unfortunately my exertions one evening left the underarm feathers matted and sweaty and Frankie was understandably furious when party night arrived.

  ‘You’ve ruined it, wearing it to one of your bloody concert
s!’ she accused me. I could hardly tell her I’d been giving a concert, not going to one.

  We were totally convinced of our impending superstardom. Puffing on menthol cigarettes after our lounge gigs, we’d talk about ‘when’ not ‘if’ we were famous pop legends, even discussing our early retirements at the height of our careers.

  ‘I think I’ll go out on top and become a recluse.’

  ‘It’s important to break America first . . .’

  Our careers as million-selling recording artistes imminent, we were more dismissive than ever of our peers, and our attitude didn’t endear us to them either.

  One song we wrote, ‘Don’t Take The Juice’, was about life for us at St Benedict’s.

  Don’t take the juice, boys,

  There’s no excuse, boys.

  I’m sorry if I seem to be cracked, boys,

  Sorry but there’s no money back, boys.

  We were called ‘queers’ and ‘homos’ every hour of the school day. We were pushed and shoved and hit over the head with books. The fact that the school staff turned a blind eye gave the real bullies in our midst the green light to continue.

  ‘You bring it on yourself, you know . . .’ a master said to me once.

  The danger began each morning as soon as I got on the bus. Even sitting downstairs another boy from St Benedict’s might get on and take a seat behind me. Someone once set fire to the nylon lining of my coat, resulting in a very passable Joan of Arc impersonation. A brick flew past me, inches from my head, as I walked down Eaton Rise.

  As we got older it was a thrill for younger boys to join in, having a go themselves at the odd couple, who in normal circumstances would be off-limits because of their age and size. We weren’t just the Nancy boys for our year, but for the whole school. We were famous, albeit in a dangerous form.