Gay Life, Straight Work

by Donald West

  Many politicians lived in the Hampstead area and well-known characters were among our clients. Pietro was never intimidated and could sometimes be alarmingly cheeky. When a gentleman came in accompanied by a younger lady and announced grandly “My name is Wedgwood Benn”, Pietro, who perfectly well knew who he was, when given a cheque for payment, asked him to write his name and address on the back. Another time, when he got into an argument with the future Baroness Gaitskill, who wanted him to take back an item which he felt sure she had accidentally damaged herself, he blurted out “You’re not the first lady yet”. Very soon after, her husband, who was in line to become prime minister, took ill and died unexpectedly. Equally characteristically, Pietro, remembering what he had said, was much upset. For myself, I would have been more obsequious. When I used the car to deliver a piece of furniture to the Gaitskills’ house in Frognal, I doubt I would have refused a tip, had one been offered.

  One anxious incident occurred while Pietro was still working at the Dorchester and had a day or two free from shifts. We drove into the country looking for antiques and arrived at a modest hotel late in the evening. This was at the height of the cold war scare and Pietro’s foreign accent must have aroused the curiosity of the man who booked us in. At any rate he alerted the police, who were looking through hotel registers. I was woken in the night by voices in the next room. It was the police, who took Pietro to the station, detaining him there overnight until they had contacted the authorities in London to confirm his status as an immigrant worker. Fortunately we had obtained separate rooms. To be found sleeping together might have led to more serious questions.

  A more pleasant memory is of the much spoiled pet cat, the one who visited the Dorchester. We both became very attached to her and we could only take holidays together when suitable arrangements were made for her care, which from time to time meant Hedda stepping in as house sitter. When I moved to Cambridge and acquired a garden Pietro rescued a baby thrush that had fallen from a tree and been deserted by its mother. He fed it with a dropper and it survived. It was kept indoors with Pietro constantly steering away the cat from molesting it. Considering the cat’s unsuccessful attempts to catch pigeons, it seems a miracle she never attacked this bird. In time they grew to tolerate each other, sometimes feeding from the same dish. The cat had the habit of sleeping in the shop window and the thrush would perch on its back. Local residents would call in with gifts of worms. As time went by the bird would fly out of the window and spend the night in a tree. I transported it by car to Cambridge, perched much of the time on the steering wheel, hopping from side to side to keep erect when the car made a turn. We released it back into the garden from whence it came and for a long time it used to return, still half tame. The story of this bird, complete with a photo of Pietro nursing it in his arms together with the cat, appears in a book about pets by the Cambridge psychologist Alice Heim.

  Taking up work in Cambridge in 1960 caused only partial separation from Pietro as I was making frequent visits to London for the university research I was doing, and he was spending weekends and holidays at the old cottage I acquired in Milton on the outskirts of Cambridge. Milton was then a true village, but is now virtually a suburb of Cambridge with a Tesco supermarket and extensive housing development. Situated on a road leading out of the village to countryside and some locks on the River Cam, the cottage was made from two labourers’ dwellings that had been part of a terrace. The elongated sitting room, bridging the two original rooms, had a central pillar, a remnant of what had been an interior dividing wall. At each end a fireplace and a narrow steep staircase gave access to the two bedrooms. Due to the steep, tiled mansard roof they were more like attics, It was a primitive arrangement, but adequate for our needs. There was a spacious garden with an ancient cow shed and the remains of a pigsty at the far end. On one side was a farmhouse, on the other, some distance away within its own grand enclosure, was a large period house. The cottage was sufficiently unusual and picturesque to impress visitors. Pietro took an immediate liking to it and spent much time and labour converting rotting cabbage patches and a hayfield lawn into an attractive garden. The perimeter trees he planted proved useful when the next door farmer moved from his house and sold his fields, and new houses sprang up close by. New houses also appeared on the opposite neighbour’s land, the nearest of them not more than a metre from the windowless end wall of our sitting room. Luckily the neighbours on both sides proved friendly and all the years we were there showed no signs of being concerned we were gay. Both sets of neighbours kept in touch for many years after we left.

  The cottage had one great advantage. An elderly, childless local couple, known as Fred and Mrs Smith, had looked after the place for previous occupants, the wife cleaning inside and Fred, a retired market gardener, seeing to the land. They had even helped when the two units of the building were being knocked into one. For the pittance that was all they would accept, they cared for us over the years as if we were their own offspring, until Fred died and the wife had to go into a nursing home. We both came to think of the cottage as our real home, even when Pietro was obliged to work far away. We entertained friends there and spent much time making small improvements, modifying the plumbing, insulating the loft and adding a shower closet and a makeshift conservatory at the rear. The only major disaster was when one night, while I was sleeping alone in the cottage, there was a loud noise and part of the roof collapsed and some of the irreplaceable old tiles were smashed.

  Moroccan Interludes

  Apart from the shop and the cottage, holiday travel was another activity that kept us together, My GP was a gay doctor who loved Morocco and took me with him for my first holiday to Tangier. At that time Tangier was a popular resort for foreigners wanting to take advantage of the plethora of young Moroccans offering themselves for sex at modest prices. Pietro did not want to participate in the gay scene, but he went with me many times to Morocco where we both enjoyed driving round the endlessly varied countryside, from the mild Mediterranean coast and across the Atlas ranges, stretching from lush terrain, through gorges and waterfalls and the bare Anti-Atlas to the arid south and the beginnings of the dune-swept Sahara. It was only in later years, following the 1975 ‘Green March’, when Morocco occupied the old Spanish Sahara, that it became possible to drive beyond TanTan (opposite the Canaries) and down the wild Atlantic coast, where the desert comes down to the ocean cliffs, to the former capital Laayoune and further on to Dakhla.

  Some of our trips were made in hired Renault 4s, small, sturdy, high-slung cars suited to uneven stony roads, and some in my second-hand Range Rover, which we could sleep in. The latter was used for one of our earliest and longest trips, through Morocco into neighbouring Algeria and then south across the many miles of flat, stony wasteland of the Great Erg before crossing the Sahara to Tamanrasset and the Ahaggar mountains.

  It was not so long since Algeria had been in a bitter war against the French colonists and the country was not a particularly welcoming place for tourism. Entering Algeria was a dreary business of bureaucratic delays. Arriving at a grand-looking hotel we were ushered in by attendants who left us to carry our own luggage, but clearly expected tips. The accommodation included an impressive, marble-lined and well-plumbed bathroom, but no water supply! The further south one went the friendlier were the natives. We came upon an isolated Marabout, a monument which travellers were encouraged to circle round several times to ensure good luck for the rest of the journey. An old man was sitting there alone beside a feeble, coughing, emaciated boy, obviously suffering from some advanced lung disease. Though not my business, I felt somehow guilty just passing by.

  Further south we were stopped by authorities who would not let us proceed without checking that we had adequate water and cans of fuel and would state our destination and agree to report to the police on arrival. At this point we hired a guide. He turned up for departure with a family of women and children and much luggage to be packed into the Range Rover. The guide took us on som
e alarming short cuts away from the main track. The main road of impacted sand had developed corrugations that caused vehicles to shudder unpleasantly. To avoid this, drivers would move to one side or the other, producing subsidiary tracks. As sand blew over and obscured the borders of the road it was only too easy to wander off and get lost in the desert. Perhaps this was how Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark famously lost himself in the same area. When we had a puncture and were changing the wheel, the guide and his family walked off, opened capacious parasols and began enjoying a picnic, thoughtfully sending back to us bits of tough camel meat that we had to bury in the sand to avoid giving offence. It was so hot one could not touch the metal sides of the vehicle and the carburettor had to be wrapped in wet rags to avoid vapour lock. The petrol stations were hundreds of miles apart and attracted long queues waiting for the sun to go down for the pumps to start working.

  Arriving at Tamanrasset, the heat subsided and the surrounding mountains were a marked change from flat desert and mini dunes. Blue-robed Tuaregs were much in evidence. The Range Rover attracted children wanting lifts and offering to show us the swimming hole. One small boy asked us to stop off at his home to fetch his swimming trunks. A stern-looking, bejewelled Tuareg mother, quite unlike the veiled, retiring Arab women, confronted us, wanting a tip. Pietro was horrified when I suggested she might think she was selling the boy for sex. The swimming hole was a shallow pond where nothing but innocent splashing about occurred.

  In the hills above Tamanrasset was a spring that was a gathering place for nomadic Tuaregs. We visited a young French student who was camping with them there. He was not an admirer of the Tuareg lifestyle. He told us they owned a herd of camels that they set free to wander and graze and then spent most of the rest of their time retrieving them. He had become bored with a diet of camel meat and eagerly devoured the tinned sardines we had with us. After a brief stay we returned to Morocco and home without a guide and without mishap.

  In Morocco we thought to buy a caravan, but were persuaded by the vendor to buy instead, at a similar price, a tiny terraced house on Escalier Sidi Hosni, a passageway in the Tangier Kasbah, overlooking the Sidi Hosni Palace of Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress. It was made up of two small rooms, one above the other, a flat roof for sitting out, and a multi-function WC, consisting of an Arab style hole in the floor with a shower hose suspended above it.

  The house proved a mixed blessing, but it did bring us into closer contact with the everyday life around us than if we had holidayed in tourist hotels. We were advised that, in view of regulations about foreign ownership, an additional cash sum would be needed to negotiate the allocation of the title. Of course this was euphemism for bribery. Visiting the solicitor to complete the purchase, we were whispering to each other in the waiting room when a dignified robed gentleman, sitting opposite made disapproving noises and gestures as if we were in a church. He followed us into the solicitor’s office. When the moment came to hand over the cash, he came forward, took the money, placed it neatly inside the sleeve of his robe and wished us a happy stay in Morocco. It was one of my first lessons in the importance of appearance over substance.

  On another occasion, when the Moroccan who looked after the house in our absence failed to meet us on arrival, we learned he had been arrested and was in prison after involvement in a bar-room brawl. A trial was to be held in a day or two and the lawyer advised that a substantial bribe would secure his immediate release and for a lesser sum he would be free in two weeks. I opted for the latter and attended a solemn trial presided over by a pompously attired judge who, after seemingly elaborate discussion of the evidence, pronounced the predicted outcome.

  Alcohol, officially condemned by Moslem law, was freely available in tourist restaurants, but not in smaller native establishments, although, in one of the latter, we saw wine being poured from teapots into cups. Cannabis, known locally as Kif, was officially banned, although the smell of it wafted from old men smoking in the surrounding cafés. Across the passage facing us was a café with posters proclaiming ‘Kif kills’. Young clients from there would sit on our doorstep and, as a friendly gesture, offer to share their cannabis, which they called facetiously ‘Moroccan whisky’. We always politely declined. In Ketema, a region where Kif growing is tolerated, boys would stand by the roadside waving bags of the stuff for passing motorists to buy. Tourists were in danger from the authorities if found in possession of it when crossing borders. Now the authorities have clamped down more heavily on drugs and illegal sex. On a more recent visit to Morocco, when driving through Ketama, progress was blocked by a large car with several young men inside who pressed me and my passenger to go with them to collect some Kif. They were quite aggressive about it, probably because their trade was under threat. I managed to start up suddenly and squeeze past, but they chased close behind for miles. I suspected there could be police checks further on and that a tourist would pay dearly for carrying cannabis.

  Stop signs at ‘T’ junctions on deserted country roads can be a trap. Drivers tempted to make only a pause are confronted by waiting police wanting to register a traffic infraction. A small ‘pourboire’ usually settles the matter. From my own experience of a traffic accident, I do not envy any tourist caught up in a court case. The incident occurred as I was starting up the car, having called at a shop on a main urban road. A small, steeply sloping side road was just behind. A boy came pelting down this slope and literally ran into the back of the car. I heard a slight thud, which I thought was a football, as kids were kicking balls around in the road. On looking back I saw people running into the road, so I stopped to see what had happened. Almost immediately the police were there. Although the car was at a standstill, I was asked why I had not stopped after an accident. The boy had cut his mouth on the rear bumper. After returning to England I received a summons, forwarded from the house in Sidi Hosni, to appear at a court in Tangier. Fortunately I had taken the precaution to secure a witness to what had happened and I wrote to the court a long statement. The arrival of a demand for payment of a fine was the first I knew that a trial and conviction had taken place. Knowing that if this was not paid I would become liable for further offences, I approached the British Consul to pay the sum on my behalf. He agreed to do so, but it was a long time before he was able to get it accepted, presumably because more money could be extracted for failure to pay on time.

  The King of Morocco, supposedly a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, was featured in all the newspapers taking decisions on behalf of his country. His dictatorship was not without occasional unrest. Once, when we were sun-bathing on the beach the crowd suddenly disappeared. On our way back to the house the streets were deserted and the shops closed and shuttered. We learned later that shots had been fired at the King’s plane as it approached Rabat airport. A story circulated afterwards that he had survived by grabbing the microphone connected to traffic control and shouting “The King is dead!”, causing the shooting to stop. Until the outcome was announced, the radio was playing martial music while people stayed indoors waiting. When it was known the King was still in charge they came out cheering. The execution of the officers responsible for the attempted coup, including the spectacle of their weeping relatives, was shown on TV.

  At times car travel was hampered by spiked barricades slung across the roads, manned by soldiers demanding identity papers and explanations of the purpose of one’s journey. This was connected with the protracted skirmishes with Algeria, notably over the gradual take-over of the Spanish Sahara against the resistance of the Algeria-supported Pollisario. During a stay at a hotel at the foot of the famous Todra Gorges, we found on returning from a late afternoon walk that the place was emptied of guests and the bedrooms occupied by soldiers. Some ‘rebels’ had escaped into the mountains and were being chased with helicopters. We were obliged to sleep in the public rooms until the situation had quietened down.

  Morocco has more than man-made excitements. Being caught in an alarming sandstorm, reaching shelte
r just in time, remains unforgettable. Equally startling, near Goulemine, the car entered a cloud of locusts. The windscreen was obscured and the radiator was a mass of burned insects. When the cloud passed we could not proceed before scraping the creatures out of the engine. On reaching an hotel where the doors opened onto an open courtyard, we had to shovel away a pile-up of dead locusts before we could open the door to our room.

  We were still young enough to be undeterred by such incidents and to be intrigued by some Moslem habits. It was unexpected to be kept waiting at a petrol station while the attendants completed their obligatory timed prayers and it was an experience trying to shake hands with a peasant couple after we had given them a lift. The man had no problem, but the woman could give no more than a quick tap on the palm with a forefinger before hastily jumping back. During Ramadan, at a large restaurant in Casablanca, soup was served a little in advance of sundown. The spectacle of diners with spoons at the ready waiting for the signal to begin struck us as particularly amusing. When we were camping out one night in a remote area, a boy nearby was guarding some road mender’s equipment overnight. He had no watch and kept approaching us to ask the time. It was Ramadan and he was hungry. Pietro, taking pity, advanced his watch.

  The Range Rover proved useful on occasion, helping some grateful young soldiers whose car was stuck in soft sand and racing a scorpion victim to hospital. Another time, when driving along an apparently dry beach, we sank into a wet patch. Luckily willing volunteers were swiftly on hand to insert a raft of planks under the vehicle so it could be jacked up sufficiently to allow rails to be pushed under the wheels enabling it to be driven off.