A Young Man's Passage

by Julian Clary

  At a given moment we’d whip off our headscarves and Oxfam coats (mine was primrose yellow, Glad’s was hot pink) and underneath we were Amanda and Elyot once more, but a Vaudeville version. As ridiculously posh as Glad and May were common, we over-enunciated horribly: ‘I’ve nehever lohoved hany hwun helse for han hinstant!’

  Although we can’t sing we then launched into ‘Someday I’ll Find You’ and some of the musical monologues found in Soho.

  Stephanie was allowed a show-stopping impersonation of ‘Carmen’, the Spanish tea lady from the refectory. (She would give us cut-price biscuits if the supervisor Olive wasn’t looking.) To the tune of ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ she sang: ‘Don’t cry for me, pretty lady, the truth is, it isn’t worth it, they say it cost fifteen and a half, I charge you twelve and a half, you don’t tell no one, you don’t tell Olive!’

  Glad and May returned after Steph’s spot for the highlight of the show, the Handbag Competition. Linda would say, ‘Do you know, May, I feel like a rummage . . .’ which was our cue to dive into the audience and secure a bag each before they could be lifted to safety. ‘There’s a prize for who’s got the most interesting handbag . . .’ we told the audience before a callous and unrestrained autopsy of the contents.

  It was a lot of studenty nonsense really, but these lunchtime shows were a hit so it was a natural progression for us to move on to An Evening With Glad and May, in which we were somewhat grander. ‘Both of us have gifts bestowed upon us by powers beyond the realms of your limited imaginations. Glad’s mother was a spiritualist, her father was a comedian – she’s a happy medium.’

  Somewhat influenced by Dame Edna Everage and Bette Midler, we called ourselves ‘Housewives Extraordinaire’, and got our friend Simon ‘Hunky’ Hughes to interview us as ‘Michael Parkinbox’.

  As May, I had a troublesome son called Janice.

  ‘I was just tidying his room the other day, Glad, and I wasn’t prying – but I’d just rolled back the carpet when I found . . . this! A suspender belt. It’s uncanny.’

  ‘And unnatural,’ added Glad.

  ‘It came as a shock when I’d just forced the lock

  Of the wardrobe and out fell the gear.

  There was lipstick and rouge and a dress that was huge,

  And earrings, one for each ear.

  He must look a sight, I thought, dressed up at night,

  So that’s where he goes after tea.

  While I finish the grub and Ken’s gone to the pub,

  He’s upstairs looking prettier than me!’

  We seemed to have a penchant for comic rhymes. Glad’s husband, Vick, had recently expired after a nasty cough and cold. (‘Towards the end he was known as “Vick the nasal spray”.’) Being vegetarian she buried him somewhere leafy and green: the cabbage patch. She spared no expense and on his gravestone was the following inscription:

  Vick was vegetarian,

  I thought him such a hoot.

  He used to nibble nuts

  And he liked a bit of fruit.

  We didn’t rehearse a great deal, and when we did we just made each other laugh. I’m quite sure much of the act was funny only to ourselves. We enjoyed being reckless and making it up as we went along. It was an antidote to all the ‘proper’ plays we were involved with, and with each other there, we had no fear of being lost for words. Mostly, everyone waited for the handbag competition, a hit-and-miss but rather daring bit of improvisation. I hooked out Chantal’s handbag on one occasion and read the entries for her diary that week. Unfortunately I shared with everyone the news that she had visited the doctor on the Wednesday with itchy nipples. Chantal never spoke to me again. Do hope the problem has cleared up by now.

  Linda and Neen were both a year older than me, and wiser in every sense. I had just left my sheltered, suburban life in Teddington. Linda had a council flat in Deptford and Neen shared a house in Clapham where everyone had half a shelf in the fridge and adhered to a cleaning rota stuck on the back of a door. Both had boyfriends, past and present. Slowly I absorbed their feminist ideals, left-wing politics and sense of style. My carefully ironed shirts and colour-coordinated tank tops, ‘loon’ trousers and slip-on shoes would not do. My hair was worn in a carefully blow-dried sweep with a fetching side-parting. I don’t remember a specific makeover but if Linda shrieked and Neen hooted when I arrived at college I knew I’d made a mistake. Slowly I transformed, finding collarless granddad shirts in thrift shops, braces, baggy trousers and boots. I had two favourite T-shirts, one with a big picture of Hilda Ogden, the other featuring Bet Lynch.

  ‘Let’s bleach your hair,’ said Linda one day and I let her. She produced a packet of Born Blonde and set to work, not allowing me to see the results until she’d finished. Every few minutes she’d poke around under the cap and say ‘Nothing’s happening’. The last time she looked her eyes widened and she rushed me into the bathroom to shampoo the bleach out.

  ‘Oh Jules! Jules!’ she said with horror when I’d towelled myself dry. Only then was I given access to the mirror. The result was a garish mix of sunset orange streaked with primrose yellow. We both collapsed in mortified hysterics.

  ‘Get me a bottle of gin!’ I said when I could speak, and Linda rushed out to the off-licence. (I’d got a taste for cheap gin that term.) It didn’t seem so bad when I was drunk, but it was. You do occasionally see teenage boys at bus stops with frightful hair that is clearly the result of a similar home-bleaching experiment. I went around for months like that. Linda laughed every time she saw me. I broke the news of my look to my parents by letter:

  Now we come to the little matter of my hair. I enclose the photograph to let you become accustomed to the change before I descend on Wiltshire au flesh. I think the village shop and the priest should be given prior notice but we’ll let the rest discover for themselves. Oh, what a mistake it is. I collapsed in a heap on the bathroom floor when I saw it and venturing out has become a major ordeal. The refectory came to quite a standstill this morning.

  I couldn’t see my friends – I just heard them screaming!

  However, it won’t last for ever and when I’m old and grey

  I may be glad I did such an outrageous thing.

  We went on pro-abortion marches, discussed whether or not all men were potential rapists and loathed Margaret Thatcher. Once I went with Linda to a meeting of the SWP, although I was rather bored by the comrades. One night at a party I was handed a joint. Forgetting my promise to my mother, I took it. After a few puffs I fainted, and when I came round was sure I’d had a terrible accident.

  ‘Get me some trousers!’ was all I said, repeatedly.

  FOR MY SECOND year as a resident at Blackheath Rise I shared a bedroom with Steve, who wasn’t half as much fun as Nick had been. Although he never vomited in my fruit bowl, he snored. Not just heavy breathing and the occasional snort but a proper foghorn, window-rattling snore.

  ‘Steve! You’re snoring!’ I used to say every few minutes. He was most apologetic and took to bringing his boots over to my bedside before retiring so I could throw them at him when it all got too much. Since I aimed for his head with some success, he devised a new method: gaffer-taping a boot to the end of a broom handle so I could prod him out of his slumbers a little less violently.

  One day in the grubby kitchen in the Rise I took a swig of orange juice that was off and it made me sick. Although I recovered quickly enough, the nausea came back a few weeks later, then went, then came back, and so on for the next year. The doctor told me it was nerves, and I got little sympathy from Steve.

  ‘Having your once-a-month again are you?’ he’d ask when he entered the bedroom to find me groaning on my bed under the moleskin fur coat I got for a snip at Greenwich Market. (I thought I looked glamorous and chic, but as photos prove, I was mistaken.) I used to read his diary when he went out and came across this somewhat unsympathetic description: ‘Greta Garbo has the shits again.’

  A month later I was revising for the second-year exams
at my parents’ house when I was sick once more. I must be nervous about the exams, I thought. My parents were away but came back to find me curled up in agony on the stairs, so thought it best to call an ambulance.

  At St Margaret’s Hospital in Swindon a doctor lubricated his rubber-gloved finger and inserted it up my bottom. When a sharp press to the right caused a breathtaking increase in pain, he confidently identified a case of acute appendicitis and told the nurses to prepare me for surgery.

  Five minutes later, six rubber-gloved medical students appeared, all wanting to digitally invade me in the interests of their future diagnostic abilities. After the third stab of finger-induced agony I put a stop to it, explaining that under normal circumstances they could jab away all night, but now was not a good time.

  Out of action for a few weeks I missed the exams and was told the boring news that I’d have to sit them at the end of the third year. I got a nice ‘get well’ card from the Rise, signed by all.

  The last I heard of my old roommate Steve, he’d become a prison officer, which seems about right.

  Someone who was most concerned about my confinement in hospital was the front of house manager at the Old Vic, Patrick James. With his stubby neck, fleshy lips and immaculate suits, he was the Paul Burrell of his time. He’d had twin 19-year-old sons, one of whom had fallen to his death from a helicopter, but whatever his contribution to family life had been back in Ireland, he was now a salacious queen and no mistake. His big moment came each evening before the doors opened when he took the stage for the fire drill. ‘Mr Jet is in the . . . stalls bar!’ he would announce with a trembling voice, and the ushers, situated by the doors on each level of the theatre, would hurriedly usher out the imaginary audience. ‘This way out please! No need to panic . . .’

  When I came back to work looking pale and interesting, his flirtations went up a gear. Starting with extra shifts and progressing to gifts of silk ties and expensive aftershave, he whisked me off to Joe Allen’s restaurant to wine and dine me. I became very partial to Brandy Alexanders and he once bought me nine on the trot, sure that this, at last, would lower my resistance. He pounced on me in the back of a taxi that night, but to no avail. I was having none of it.

  He wrote to me:

  I’m not sure I can go on much longer with the fantasy – maybe, if not probably, of my own creation – of the relationship that does exist between us. I had hoped for something more. The crux of one of my favourite plays – de Montherlant’s ‘La rie dont le prince est un enfant’ – is St Paul’s dictum: ‘Woe to thee O Land whose king is a child.’ It has haunted me all my life and now seems more potent than ever. I feel deeply unhappy, ashamed at my lack of control and totally unsure of where it leads me.

  It didn’t lead him into my trousers, that was for sure. Once I got Nick from school a job at the Old Vic too, Patrick quickly transferred his affections to my equally disinterested friend. We had to play along with him as we loved our job: the Prospect Theatre Company were in residence and Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet was a sensation, not to mention Barbara Jefford as Gertrude, whose fabulous sweeping turns we imitated in the aisles each night.

  After selling the programmes before the show, the procedure was to take the money and unsold programmes up to Patrick’s office, where he’d log the sales and the cash onto a sales form. Nick and I, suspicious as to how he paid for all the expensive gifts and the Brandy Alexanders, took to creeping into the office unobserved to analyse his bookkeeping. All was quickly revealed. If we’d sold 50 programmes, the form said 20. Patrick James was on the fiddle.

  We weren’t sure what to do with this information until Nick had a brainwave. He wrote a short story about a theatre manager called James Patrick, guilty of a not dissimilar scam at his fictional playhouse, and gave it to Derek Jacobi to read. Very soon afterwards Patrick was relieved of his post and returned to Ireland.

  THIRD-YEAR STUDENTS HAD to make their own living arrangements, so I moved into a dull terraced house in Brownhill Road. I was the only lodger to John, a somewhat creepy confirmed bachelor in his fifties, fond of cardigans and prolonged eye contact. I’d been there a few days before I noticed the ornamental whips adorning the walls. Curious. John never seemed to go out and I would lie in bed and listen to him creeping about the house long after bedtime. In the morning the whips had been rearranged . . . I thought I should think about moving. When he brushed past me in the kitchen one day and exhaled lustfully in my ear, I went to my room and packed my stuff. For the next few months I lived with Auntie Tess and Uncle Ken in Syon Lane, Osterley, and over Christmas I worked at the British Gas headquarters at Marble Arch. Elaine and Micky, the two women I worked with, were rather preoccupied creating their wardrobe for the coming season, and little photocopying was achieved. My job mainly consisted of meeting anyone bold enough to approach the photocopying department and tell them that we were very busy indeed, snowed under, in fact. Couldn’t possibly photocopy a single thing till next Friday. Best to send the job out if it was at all urgent. Spread out on the other side of the door were patterns and fabrics for summer dresses and jaunty blouses.

  I was sitting in a Greenwich café one day, moaning to my friends about how hard it was to find a room somewhere near college that I could afford, when the waitress said she had a room available in her flat. Within days I had moved in to 54B Hardy Road in Blackheath. It was a big, sunny upper maisonette in a posh road. Lynda, the waitress, lived there with her black cat, Samson. I had a large bedroom with a double bed and a church pew. The rent was £12 a week, inclusive. I wrote to my sister Frances.

  Living here keeps me in very good spirits. Lynda had the fumigators in so the fleas have gone. Something had to be done: I had 30 bites on one leg. Lynda had none, so they obviously liked me. Being popular has its drawbacks, you see. I got beaten up on Monday night. Linda and I had been out to the theatre and we were just standing at the bus stop in New Cross. There were two boys standing behind us, but we didn’t think anything of it. Suddenly I felt an arm round my neck and then they put the fist in. I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. I thought they were going to kill me. Perhaps they would have done more damage than they did but Linda bravely jumped on one of them and pulled him off. Then I fell on the pavement and expected them to put the boot in but they ran away instead. They didn’t try to take our bags or anything – that’s what amazes me. They just wanted to beat me up. But apart from a cut lip and a bouquet of bruises, I’m unscathed. Straight afterwards we saw a police van outside the chip shop.

  Me: I’ve just been assaulted.

  Police officer: What did they look like?

  Me: Ugly.

  I’m going to start decorating my room tomorrow, I think. Although I may put it off until after Christmas because I’m too lazy and too poor at the moment. I think that’s all the news. Except you must see the film Yanks. I cried six times.

  See you soon (if not before),

  love Julian.

  A Nigerian woman whose name I can’t recall lived in the room opposite me. She had a stunning smile but she was very shy and hardly ever came out of her room. She never used the kitchen, preferring to cook on an electric ring in her bedroom. She would scurry to the kitchen in her blue dressing gown late at night to wash pots and plates before dashing back. She never went out, but she appeared in the hall one Saturday afternoon – which was in itself unheard of – wearing a silk two-piece with a matching hat.

  ‘I’m going to get married,’ she said in a very flat voice. Lynda and I said congratulations, and off she went. An hour later she came back to her room and carried on as before.

  When she moved out, Cathy, a glamorous nurse from Greenwich Hospital, moved in. She altered her uniforms to show off her legs and figure, and wore pale blue eyeshadow. ‘All right, doll?’ she used to say. We would sit at the kitchen table discussing her marriage prospects. ‘I’m after a doctor or a lawyer,’ she said.

  Back at Goldsmiths we decided to form a theatre company and go to the Edinburgh Fest
ival. Under the guidance of David Gale, Company Work Theatre was a no-frills theatrical cooperative. Shows were performed in ‘the round’, everyone was equal and there were no stars. We were to perform As You Like It in the afternoons and Twelfth Night in the evenings, but there was a morning slot available too at the Walpole Hall if anyone had any suggestions. I rather boldly put one of my plays forward for discussion. The Axe and Victims was a black comedy about a rapist. (Attacks were happening on a daily basis. As Grandma Lucy said, ‘He broke in halfway through Charlie’s Angels and I’ll never know what happened in the end!’) It was rather bad taste, but surprisingly it was accepted.

  Rehearsals were fraught. I wrote to my parents.

  Yesterday I was not a happy man. I went as co-director to a rehearsal of my play. When I left, I was no longer co-director. Firstly, people kept asking me impossible questions about why their character is the way it is, what sort of background they came from and other matters of logic (which has never been my strong point). Then a troublesome actor called Giddon lived up to his reputation, throwing a tantrum because he didn’t understand why his character had to say the line: ‘I like Vera Lynn. I admire her teeth.’ I wish they’d just learn the lines and DO it, leaving the Stanislavski technique where they found it. Anyway, once again I wished I’d never written the thing. Max, my co-director, said I made him nervous and our ideas were too different. By mutual agreement I’ve now handed over to him and I shall keep well away. What the end result will be we’ll have to wait and see.