by Rupert Smith
Monday 19 February: Half term at last. Went round to N’s house, his mother out. Gave him Little Richard LP, he said I was his best friend after all and he blames Phyllis for trying to turn us both queer. I said our friendship was clean and pure, reminded him of Sal Mineo. Smoked cigarettes. It rained all day.
Tuesday 5 March: Saw N after school walking down road with Gill’s friend Jane. Holding hands. How dare she?
Wednesday 6 March: Off school. Too sick to get out of bed. Made myself puke, Mum wanted to send for doctor, I said no doctor could help me.
Friday 12 April: At last! Drama group meets again for first time in months. Phyllis ‘under strict supervision’ from headmaster, he warns me – choice of plays not his, rehearsals to be monitored by prefects. Ph. says it’s like Nazi Germany, promises me lead role in all productions.
Thursday 18 April: Nutter refuses to join drama group. Says he’s ‘too busy’ to get involved, which means he’s too busy seeing Jane. How dare she hold him back?
Friday 26 April: First rehearsal for Journey’s End, R. C. Sherriff, stupid play about war, head’s choice of course. No women in it at all. Still, my part quite good, Phyllis says uniforms will look nice. Haven’t told Mum and Dad.
Saturday 4 May: Big rehearsal all morning for JE. Told Mum and Dad I was in special detention for breaking a window during a football game. Dad seemed quite pleased. Rehearsal went well. Phyllis took me for lunch at Golden Egg afterwards, told me I was the most talented young actor of my generation.
Thursday 16 May: Nutter hasn’t been at school all this week. Mrs Cole came in to see headmaster today. N’s in trouble for playing truant. Went to see him after school, he says he’s finished with Jane because she ‘wouldn’t’, although by the look of her I’d say she already has. It’s his birthday soon, don’t know what to get him.
Monday 3 June: One month exactly before first night of Journey’s End. Extra rehearsal tonight for my big speech at Phyllis’s house. Goes well, he says I’m developing splendidly. Gives me a glass of sherry! Home late. Told Mum and Dad I’d been out with ‘the gang’ drinking coffee. Dad smelt alcohol on my breath, called me ‘a terror’ and laughed. Nutter’s birthday tomorrow.
Tuesday 4 June: N’s birthday (fifteen). Went round to his house after school and gave him bottle of whisky I’d ‘borrowed’ from Dad’s cupboard. N very pleased, gave me some. His mum gave him a guitar! He tried out Elvis poses in bedroom.
Monday 1 July: Final week of rehearsals. Costumes came today, they’re great. I have two, formal uniform with puttees, epaulettes, etc., and nightshirt for hospital scene. Phyllis practised tying bandages on me today.
Wednesday 3 July: First night!!! Headmaster came to dress rehearsal last night, no changes. Show went well. Nutter didn’t come. Phyllis very pleased, gave me a lift home afterwards, dropped me off at end of road. Long talk in car before I got out. Told Mum and Dad I’d been out with Gill (joke). They believed me. Asked Dad for advice on where to take girls on dates.
Friday 5 July: Last night of Journey’s End. Hospital scene very good tonight, saw girls crying in audience. Phyllis crying too afterwards, wanted to take me back to flat for ‘nightcap’. I said no. Head and cronies came backstage to compliment us. Nutter still didn’t come, too busy practising guitar he says, doesn’t want to see me ‘playing at soldiers’.
Friday 19 July: Last day of term. Phyllis embarrassing in class, hands out prizes to all best pupils (I get three of the five prizes). Nutter didn’t turn up again today. Wasn’t at home either. Left him a note.
Sunday 4 August: Nutter says YES! At last! Can’t wait!
What Nutter had finally agreed to, after weeks of pestering, was my long-cherished plan for a camping and cycling holiday. I’d secured my parents’ permission by telling them that Nutter and I were taking Gill and Jane with us ‘in separate tents, of course’ (they didn’t believe that bit and were convinced that we were going away for a week of sexual intercourse). What finally persuaded Nutter to agree was my suggestion that he could cycle with his guitar slung over his back, that we could sit around the camp fire every night drinking and singing songs just like Woody Guthrie (Nutter’s latest hero).
One Saturday afternoon in early August we set off on our bikes, Nutter with his beloved guitar and several panniers stuffed full of booze, me with the tent packed on my back and the rest of the provisions, clothes, penknives and torches overflowing from my saddle bag. It had been my intention to cycle as far as Dorset and back, stopping off at the end of every day’s ride in a suitable site where we’d pitch the tent, strip wash, cook a meal and sit under the stars. In fact, we never got further than a field outside Aldershot which we shared with a couple of elderly horses. We stopped there on the first night and Nutter immediately started drinking, leaving me to struggle with the tent and prepare the food (which we ate straight from the tin). By nine o’clock, Nutter was incoherently drunk, strumming tunelessly before collapsing unconscious in the grass, half a bottle of whisky clutched in his hand with which he had been attempting to play slide guitar in between swigs.
I managed to drag him bodily inside the tent. As he lay there snoring, the tent became unbearably stuffy with the smell of alcohol and adolescent male bodies. I couldn’t sleep. Nutter, however, was as good as dead. My dream of long, intellectual conversations under canvas evaporated. I lay there with the torch trained on Nutter’s sleeping form, contemplating the troubled upbringing that had turned a talented teenager into a self-destructive, reckless alcoholic. Finally, with the torch balanced carefully on my rucksack, I undressed him and put him inside the sleeping bag.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of rain drumming down on the canvas. I was alone in the tent; Nutter was nowhere to be seen, and his clothes had gone with him. To my relief, his guitar still lay propped against the side of the tent – he couldn’t be far. I scrambled outside and lit the tiny primus stove, boiled a billy can of water and brewed up the coffee, the smell of which brought the wanderer back to the hearth. He accepted the coffee, drank it in hunched silence with his back to me, silent except for the occasional grunt in response to my questions. Finally he turned round, looked me in the eye and said, ‘What actually happened last night?’ I was at a loss for an answer. What did he think happened last night? ‘I don’t remember going to bed,’ he said, and added, more pointedly, ‘and I don’t remember taking my clothes off.’ I just shrugged and told him I’d called it a day long before he’d finished drinking and playing his guitar, that I’d been fast asleep when he’d finally come to bed.
He was suspicious and grumpy for the rest of the day, refusing to carry on with our tour, preferring to wander the perimeters of the field with his guitar. By lunchtime I found him happily playing a tune to the two old horses, who were munching grass and eyeing him with a detached interest. He’d cheered up enough to share my spam sandwiches, but turned down my suggestion that we should search for a stream in which to bathe.
Nutter was never the same with me after that night. He grew sullen and wary, reading into my most innocent gesture some hidden meaning. At the time I was bewildered and hurt; with the benefit of hindsight I realize what he was afraid of. Nutter was more sexually precocious than me – I believe he’d had his first experience before he left the North, and had continued with his subsequent dates. It was Nutter, too, who had instructed me in the schoolboy art of self-abuse, and insisted on a full report as soon as I had achieved my first ‘wank’. Now, it seemed, he was one step ahead of me again. He suspected – and I can now see why – that I harboured homosexual longings for him. I can’t blame him. The intense erotic climate of Antony and Cleopatra, the long afternoons listening to Elvis and sharing cigarettes, and now the suspicion that I had undressed him as he lay sleeping – it all added up to a persuasive case against me.
If anybody was guilty of attempted seduction that summer, it was Nutter. After a wasted day in which he’d done nothing but mooch around the field with his guitar and ever-present bottle, we finally we
nt to bed for our second night under canvas. As I lay in my sleeping bag, Nutter undressed in front of me then stretched out naked, daring me to make the first move. Nothing happened, but from then on I knew that there was more to our relationship than simple friendship. The next morning he was even worse, and moodily announced that the holiday was ‘doing him in’ and he was returning home. I had no choice but to pack up and follow him. We didn’t see each other for the rest of the summer.
Rejected by my best friend, I faced the prospect of a new term without enthusiasm. I was vulnerable and lonely, isolated from my parents and full of strange new feelings. There was only one person who was willing to listen to me – the ever-present Mr Phillips. Perhaps he wasn’t the best influence on an impressionable young man, but he was my only refuge, and I ran to him. Of course, there was another play to rehearse, and another, and another. For the rest of my time at school, I was only truly alive when I was on stage. Emboldened by the success of Journey’s End and once again in the head’s good books, Phyllis embarked on ever more audacious productions. And I was always the hero: Doctor Faustus in Marlowe’s masterpiece, Nicky in Noël Coward’s The Vortex (‘Dear Noel was so interested to hear about your performance,’ Phyllis told me – he had been in correspondence with ‘the Master’ for many years).
My mother and father remained in complete ignorance of my stage career, a situation I was happy to encourage. They believed that I was past my ‘difficult’ stage and now busy dating girls at every available opportunity. True, I never brought any of these girls home (‘Don’t suppose they’re the type you’d want your mum to meet,’ said Dad) but that bothered nobody. At the age of sixteen, I was leading a double life – something that most of my contemporaries would not begin to do until their twenties.
Phyllis saved me from going completely off the rails. Had it not been for the discipline of learning lines and rehearsals, I would have been out looking for trouble, like Nutter. But Phyllis was a tyrant, and instilled in me a belief in the necessity of hard work and diligence. Useful lessons to learn! And, as I would later find, rare enough in show business. So, night after night, I went up to Phyllis’s flat to be coached through my lines, and to learn – about art, about theatre, about films I had never heard of during my Saturday afternoon pilgrimages to the Odeon. Together we read texts that were forbidden in the school library: Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol was the first I remember, followed by Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the novels of Genet, from which Phyllis had me read to improve my French. Finally he announced that I was ready to appear in his most ambitious production to date, the one that would bring us to the attention of the theatre world, a play by his hero Jean Cocteau. Phyllis was planning the first schools’ production of Orphée.
To understand this daring scheme, it’s important to realize that by the age of sixteen I was physically and mentally more mature than the piping child who had ‘boyed the greatness’ of Cleopatra. I was a young man, with (as Phyllis put it) a ballet dancer’s physique and the perfect skin that I was so fortunate to keep from childhood. The role of Orpheus, the man-god, the artist with whom Death herself falls in love, was simply waiting for me. But was I, a schoolboy amateur, ready for this greatest of modern roles? Phyllis conceived the production as a dance drama, ‘total theatre’, both physically and intellectually demanding. I naturally assumed that the star part was mine – but Phyllis, to my astonishment, insisted on an audition.
At first I was crushed. Was anyone else capable of playing the role? Had Phyllis nurtured another protégé? He made me do my homework, studying Cocteau’s graphic work in a rare copy of Le Livre Blanc with which he presented me, poring over stills of the film version of Orphée starring Jean Marais. I began to understand just how demanding the role would be.
The night of the audition arrived. I had been preparing for days, learning my speech off by heart, committing to memory the exact details of Cocteau’s drawings which I planned to recreate in tableaux vivants. I reported to Phyllis’s flat determined not to leave until I had secured the part. Phyllis poured two large whiskies and told me to prepare myself while he changed out of his school tweeds and into his pyjamas and dressing gown (all silk).
I’ve never had any problem with auditions. I’ve given some of my best performances for an audience of one, focusing all my energy on the producer who’s casting me. But I’ve never given myself so completely as I gave myself to Mr Phillips that evening – I’d never known before what it was to need a role as badly as I needed Orpheus. I strode into the spotlight and began my speech, strumming an imaginary lyre as I did so. My French accent was appalling – it was many years before I became fully bilingual – but what I lacked in technique I made up for in passion. By the end, as I pleaded for the return of Eurydice, Phyllis had tears in his eyes.
But I had only just begun. Now came the dance drama, a style for which I’ve always had a natural aptitude. Without music I began to move, pouring every nuance of my troubled sixteen-year-old self into a spontaneous display of rhythmic athleticism. Inspired by the Cocteau drawings with which I was so familiar – and reliving another private performance many years ago – I began to take off my clothes. First my blazer, then my school tie, my shirt, my shoes and socks, my grey flannel trousers and finally my pants. I had almost forgotten that there was anyone watching me as I went into the last, frenzied movements of my dance, finishing off prostrate on the floor.
I was roused from my artistic euphoria by a slight dig from a slippered toe against my ribs. Phyllis stood up, extended a hand and helped me to my feet. It was the only physical contact there had been between us. ‘Dear boy, you are my Orpheus,’ he said in a tremulous voice as I dressed. ‘Perhaps you had better leave. I have . . . work to do.’ I ran home and confided to my diary:
Wednesday 5 February: Good night with P. Got Orpheus and present of £10. Best yet.
After this sensational start, rehearsals for Orphée were an austere business. It was a small cast, with few set pieces and little to distract from the central focus – me. I knew this would be my last school performance, and I wanted to give them something to remember. Night after night in my bedroom I rehearsed in whispers, creeping around the room, finally falling into bed exhausted but more often unable to sleep, sitting at the window smoking, thinking about Nutter. He had taken to full-time truancy since the summer holiday. I’d see him occasionally hanging around the town with one of his girls, smoking and flirting. Sometimes he’d acknowledge me, but more usually he’d just carry on with his business, knowing that I was watching him. During that last year at school, I almost began to hate him.
With the pressure of rehearsals and the misery of not seeing Nutter, I became confused and detached. Mr Phillips was my one contact with reality, constantly praising me and presenting me with gifts. But I felt as if I was going mad. I started shoplifting, stealing ridiculous things – pencils, rulers, batteries, sweets – coming to my senses with a stash of useless swag in my coat pockets which I would immediately ditch in the nearest bin. As spring turned to summer I was oppressed by a sense of impending disaster. I drank whenever I could – small amounts, but enough.
The end of term came at last, and with it the twin climaxes of the school year: sports day and the Leavers’ Festival, of which our production of Orphée was the centrepiece. Nutter had returned to the fold to train for the sports, competing in the long-distance events (all those hours chasing girls around town had obviously kept him in trim), and was happy to let me come running with him (I needed all my stamina for the play). I had never known him so happy and talkative, enthusing about music and how good he was getting at the guitar, his plans to move to London and get a record deal. I felt that we had unfinished business. We had to talk, and I knew how to make him.
I waited for the hottest day of the year. It was the Saturday before term ended; sports day was on the Tuesday. I called round at Nutter’s house by prior arrangement to take him out training; he would run, I would cyc
le alongside him. I’d brought water, chocolate, towels – and, unbeknown to Nutter, a bottle of brandy (a gift from Phyllis). We started from his house at a steady pace and reached the towpath that ran out of town alongside the canal. It was an appalling day to be running: there were clouds of flies, the canal stank and the heat was unbearable. I was comfortable enough on my bike, but Nutter was fading fast. ‘I need a rest,’ he announced after half an hour’s solid running, but I was merciless. ‘Not yet. You can rest at the next bridge! Come on, you can do it!’ The next bridge was a good ten minutes’ run away, well out of town where the canal cut a course through the scrubbily wooded fields.
When we finally reached our resting place, Nutter was purple-faced and soaked with perspiration. ‘Well done!’ I shouted, all cheerful encouragement as he sank to the ground. ‘You deserve a drink!’ He thought I meant water, of course.
‘If bloody only,’ he groaned, lying prone as I parked my bike against the tree. ‘I could kill for a drink.’
‘You don’t need to do that,’ I replied, producing the brandy from my saddle bag like a rabbit out of a hat. He sat up and laughed, took the bottle and drank deeply, forgetting that it’s not a good idea to slake your thirst with spirits after a five-mile run. It hit him quick and hard, just as I knew it would. Now was the time for our talk.