Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (17 page)

Ducking into a greasy café, we nervously eyed the menu. I realized that I had never dined out with my girls. We spent all our university grant money at either the pub or the fabric store.

During my childhood we rarely dined in restaurants. Betty and Terry had neither the cash nor the inclination to eat out, which was just as well, since the choices were limited to say the least. Once a year, on Betty’s birthday, we went to a Chinese place in the high street called the Tai Kwong. I remember it vividly because of the big painted sign on the window which read,
WE DO ALSO TAKE AWAY HOT MEALS
. The iffy grammar of this message kept us all in stitches, much to the embarrassment of the proprietor. My blind aunt Phyllis would make me read the sign over and over, changing the emphasis with each reading. We do
also
take away hot meals. We do also take
away
hot meals. Ha! Ha!

Back to Blackpool.

A large blond waitress loomed over our table. I ordered beans on toast, as did Rose. We were anxious about the cost, and this was the cheapest thing on the menu. Devil-may-care Angela and her beau went berserk, ordering fried eggs, sausages, fried bread, and something that is known in such establishments as “scrape.”

“Scrape” is the accumulated, lard-infused, crunchy material which coagulates in the frying pan during the course of cooking other items, such as bacon or sausages. Scrape is collected and then, somewhat brazenly and disgustingly, sold to delighted patrons as an artery-clogging side dish. Nobody could ever accuse the English of lacking an understanding of
the finer things of life.

We ate hungrily. The bill arrived. We stared at it.

I cannot recall who suggested that we run out of the restaurant without paying. Angela always maintained it was me. I still maintain it was her. One thing is for sure, there was no voice of moderation saying, “This is a really cheap meal. Why don’t we just pay for it?” We lacked that kind of leadership.

A collective panic infected us. Once the notion of flight had been posited, all conversation stopped. We stared at each other furtively, waiting to see who would make the first move. We could not go back. There was a ridiculous inevitability to the whole thing. Nobody wanted to be left holding the bill for all that delicious fare, and yet nobody wanted to be labeled the instigator of a potentially nasty incident.

Then it happened. In jittery unison, we all rose.

Accelerating wildly, we bolted, as one, out of the greasy café and into the sunlight.

The scrape eaters dived into Boots the Chemist. Rose headed for Woolworth’s. And I, for reasons which I have never been able to identify, went barreling toward the beach.

Down on the sand, the working classes of the North of England stared at me in an unfriendly way, as if I was unwanted street theater or possibly a lunatic. As I charged through their midst, kicking sand hither and thither, they clutched their cardigans about them and held their children close. Some even hurled obscenities. What was wrong with them? Hadn’t they ever seen a man in a Mickey Mouse shirt; high-waisted, navy blue, pleated Oxford bag trousers, and matching navy blue, women’s Bata platform ankle boots with four-and-a-half-inch heels, teetering across the sand before?

I loved the platform shoe era. In my Bata boots I went from five feet, four and half inches to five nine, and it felt great. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t neurotic about my lack of height. When I was thirteen, I was the tallest kid in the class. Then I stopped growing. I never grew another inch. But I wasn’t bitter. Height seemed like a biblical kind of concept. It was something that could be given and then taken away again. One had to just roll with it and wait it out. Sure enough, when the seventies arrived, platforms returned and I was tallish again.

As I—all five feet nine of me—dashed through the pale holidaymakers in my groovy Kensington High Street look, it dawned on me that I might be rather easy to spot.
Conspicuous
was the word which sprang to mind. My suspicions were confirmed when suddenly, in the distance, I heard the shriek of our blond waitress in hot pursuit. She had spotted me with the aid of a pair of World War II binoculars, which now hung
around her neck, giving her an air of military efficiency. They were no doubt kept under the counter of the café for the purpose of hunting down flitting nonpayers.

I am always impressed when chunky people, especially people whose arteries are clogged with years of scrape, turn out to be athletic. The strapping waitress rhinocerosed across the sand like a freight train, gaining on me rapidly. This was obviously not the first time she had been obliged to go the extra mile in order to get tipped.

Gradually her shrieks became louder. She was running about twice as fast as I was. In my defense, I was considerably handicapped by my footwear, the heels of which sank into the sand with each stride.

“Ay, you! Ya bastud! Stop runnin, will ya!” she yelled as she closed in on her prey, binoculars bouncing on her bosom. She was utterly terrifying.

I knew when I was licked. I stopped running and reached into my pocket. Even though I had had only beans on toast and no scrape, I was resigned to the idea that I would have to settle the entire bill. I prepared myself to charm and mollify the young lady. How hard could it be? Waitresses in greasy cafés were invariably attention-starved. I would compliment her on her athleticism and personal style. She was sure to see the humor in the whole escapade. I would give her our address in Manchester. “If ever you’re in Whalley Range, do drop by for some cottage cheese and homemade astringent!”

It did not quite work out like that. As my pursuer closed in on me, I saw with alarm that her feet were leaving the ground. There would be no charming, cheeky badinage. There would
be no forgiveness. She hurled herself toward me. She was screaming like a martial arts demon.

We both fell in a sandy heap. She landed on top of me, clunking me on the head with those accursed binoculars. As we struggled to our feet, I realized, not without concern, that she had my right arm in a half nelson, again expertly administered from years of practice.

“Yoooer kummin wi me!” she said, looking abominably self-satisfied. Now came her moment of triumph as she strong-armed me back to the café in front of a sea of amused and applauding spectators. I don’t blame them. As street theater goes—and it usually doesn’t—this was exceptionally entertaining stuff.

As we trudged toward the crime scene, I saw a police car parked outside the café. Leaning against it was a portly, red-faced, very un-glamrock police officer.

“Is the circus in town?” he sneered, referring, I am assuming, to my imaginative attire. Anxiously, I pulled out my crumpled wad of money and, with a blizzard of heartfelt apologies, paid the bill.

But this wasn’t enough for my uniformed friend. Before you could say “Prisoner of Cell Block H,” I was bundled into the back of his vehicle.

“Get in, Mary Poppins!” he said with a menacing snarl.

“How kind of you to drive me to the train station,” I said. “But I’m quite happy to walk.” The policeman squealed off down the street with me in the passenger seat.

“I’m sure you must be terribly busy. Now why don’t I just—”

“We’re going to keep driving until we find ’em. All of ’em. Vermin like you aren’t welcome in Blackpool!”

“Nor should we be, but I—”

“Is that them?” said the policeman gruffly, pointing at a group of senior citizens.

“No, my friends don’t wear plastic rain hoods.”

“Is that them?” he said, pointing to a group of delinquents who were throwing balled up fish and chip wrappers at each other. He was determined that I should rat out my accomplices. And so was I. How dare they abandon me and leave me holding the scrape tab?

We drove around for almost an hour.

We ran out of things to say.

“You’re nothing but a big girl’s blouse,” said the policeman, using one of the more colorful North English colloquialisms assigned to people such as myself.

Eventually we both got bored. When we neared the railway station, he pulled over and dumped me on the sidewalk. “Now fuck off back to Manchester, and if you ever come back to Blackpool I’ll lock you up, and you know what happens to people like you in there . . . eh?”

“Thanks awfully, Officer,” I gushed and clomped off into the station, where I found my coconspirators crowing triumphantly in the bar. Nobody was very interested in my tale of woe and public humiliation. They seemed to regard the whole escapade as some kind of hugely successful, fabulously executed heist.

*  *  *

I have never been back to Blackpool. These days I have to watch my cholesterol, and scrape is a big, fat no-no.

I
was being treated for a lisp, and Biddie was there because he dropped all his
t
’s and
h
’s.

In the late 1950s, Biddie and I found ourselves attending speech therapy classes, courtesy of Her Majesty’s Government. We must have been about seven or eight years old.

It was all very Eliza Doolittle: Biddie had to repeat words like
bottle
and
house,
and I was forced to repeat more interesting phrases, like “hot toast” and “I swallowed a sackful of snakes.”

For some reason we also had to say “Peggy Babcock” over and over at high velocity: “Peggy Babcock! Peggy Babcock! PEGGY BABCOCK!” This is a skill which I have retained to this very day. Though I still cannot swallow a sackful of snakes without a lisp lapse, I can repeat the name Peggy Babcock with machine-gun efficiency and speed.

Viewed from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, these efforts at self-improvement probably seem embarrassingly bourgeois. I would ask the reader not to judge too harshly, and to remember that our Peggy Babcocks took place at a time when upward aspiration was assumed, applauded, and actively encouraged. Improved speech was the gateway to a middle-class life and all the benefits that came along with it.

It had not yet become cool to be common.

These poignant attempts at social betterment were by no means limited to me and Biddie and our state-sponsored speech therapy classes. All over the United Kingdom people were trying anything and everything to divest themselves of their regional working-class accents. The crisp, clear, modulated speech of radio and TV announcers was the ideal to which we all aspired.

The arrival of the telephone in British homes increased the pressure to “act posh.” Phone users adopted what was known as a “telephone voice.” Once a caller had been identified, it was customary to say, “Air. Hair. Lair.” (trans.: Oh hello!).

Not everyone wanted to play the game. There was a small number of very naughty people who aspired down instead of up: there were middle-class girls who drank too much sherry and got pregnant, and public school–educated aristocrats who
splurged their family fortunes on drugs and dockyard prostitutes. Those who demonstrated these kinds of self-destructive behaviors were the objects of grave concern. They were going against the grain. They were ruining things for the rest of us. Anyone who was aspiring down instead of up ran the risk of being institutionalized and overseen by tight-lipped, pasty-faced nuns.

Biddie and I had no incentive to pretend to be more common than we already were. It made no sense whatsoever. We were determined to become more posh than we were, regardless of how many Peggy Babcocks it took to get there.

*  *  *

Fast-forward ten years.

The class struggle continues.

During my years at university, I attempted, fairly unsuccessfully, to craft a gay identity. It was hard to find a reasonable point of entry, if you’ll pardon the expression. There seemed to be only two alternatives, both of which were quite extreme.

First there was the middle-class campus Gay-Lib Society. The hippies who dominated this scene had long hair and crushed velvet maxi vests. They were radical fairies. They sat on each other’s laps at Gay-Lib meetings while knitting extra-long rainbow-colored scarves; they scribbled poetry about wizards and magical pixies. These Pre-Raphaelite nellies alternated between reading aloud from
The Lord of the Rings
and venting heartfelt homilies about repression. It was hard to take all the politicized babbling seriously, especially when everyone at these meetings was dressed up like Jethro Tull’s big sister.