Still Standing: The Savage Years (6 page)

‘I’ve never seen you go off like that before,’ I said, through mouthfuls of the dubious pink paste and pastry masquerading as a sausage roll. ‘That was some punch you gave that bloke.’

‘Serves him right,’ Hush replied, daintily picking bits of pastry off his skirt. ‘And it’s about time Phyllis here got his
finger out and started booking us into decent venues, that’s if there are any in this godforsaken hole.’

‘I’ve got you the Stone Chair and the Gemini Club tomorrow night,’ Phil protested. ‘You’ll like them, and the money’s good.’

‘Just as well,’ Hush said, shoving the last of the crisps in his mouth. ‘Now get your foot down, wench, and let’s get home. This girdle is killing me.’

CHAPTER 2

HOME WAS A
one-bedroom flat we shared with Phil and Henry, his sparky little cockatiel, in a small village called Slaithwaite (pronounced either ‘Sloughit’ or ‘Slathwaite’ by the locals) that lay in the Colne Valley five miles outside of Huddersfield. It’s a place that has frequently been used as a location for the TV shows
Where the Heart Is
and on occasions
Last of the Summer Wine
, and for the likes of Hush and me who had got used to living in London Slaithwaite seemed a grim little backwater inhabited by suspicious people who twitched their net curtains and kept allotments. Add to this very few amenities (I recall a corner shop) and a limited transport service and you had a couple of square pegs who were very much in the wrong hole.

Many years later, after I’d fallen in love with Yorkshire and bought a flat in the village of Saltaire, I revisited Slaithwaite and was amazed to find a revitalized and extremely picturesque village, not at all how I remembered it. A lot of the buildings had been cleaned up and stripped of their dirty grey overcoats to reveal a soft buttery-yellow stone underneath, and the canal had been cleared out and reopened, as had the railway station. It was a different place with lots of interesting shops and good cafés and a butcher’s called E. and
R. Grange that sold homemade pork pies and pasties the likes of which could only have been conjured up by angels in the kitchens of heaven.

Back in 1980, Hush and I didn’t see it through such rose-tinted glasses. The house we lived in had been split into two flats and we lived in the top-floor one. The flat below was unoccupied apart from the mice, which was just as well as the noise we made on our return home each night from work would’ve driven any tenant insane.

As our flat only had one single bed, occupied by Phil, we bought lilos from Huddersfield Market to sleep on. They were a bit narrow and made you sweat, squeaking like the plague of mice downstairs when you turned over, but they were certainly preferable to sleeping on the bare floorboards of our loft-conversion bedroom with the sloping ceiling. The three of us shared it with an assortment of wigs on polystyrene heads and costumes reeking of stale cigarette smoke.

Henry would fly up to our eyrie each morning and use our heads as landing pads, pulling our hair and chattering away. Hush didn’t like birds very much and wasn’t amused by the antics of this flying alarm clock, burying his head under the duvet to get away from him.

Downstairs in the kitchen Phil always had a box or two of Batchelors marrowfat dried peas soaking in a bucket together with a sodium tablet, which he would transform the next day into a grey-green lumpy mass of ‘Yorkshire caviar’, the humble but delicious mush of peas served with mint sauce and vinegar. It gave us terrible flatulence and made our attic bedroom sound like the Yorkshire Brass Band Championships.

Even though we didn’t have a lot of money we always ate
at least one good meal a day. Phil was an excellent cook, as was Hush, and both of them were capable of knocking up a three-course meal on a budget of a couple of quid. Between them they’d dish out Desperate Dan-sized portions of shepherd’s pies, stews and my favourite, corned beef hash swimming in a lake of velvety onion gravy and accompanied by the ubiquitous mushy peas. Occasionally a good-hearted neighbour would leave us a lettuce or cabbage from his allotment on the front step. One night, arriving home late from a booking, we came across a parcel on the step that looked suspiciously like a human head wrapped in newspaper, which turned out to be nothing more sinister than a snowy-white cauliflower enveloped in a copy of the previous day’s
Huddersfield Daily Examiner
.

Our bathroom was probably the most garish in Yorkshire. The walls were covered in a metallic bronze paper tastefully adorned with a pattern of Toulouse-Lautrec images set at odd angles. Strangely enough, considering the bedroom floor was bare, the floor in here was covered in a thick beige shagpile dotted with islands of tatty bath and pedestal mats in a shade of salmon pink that clashed beautifully with the deep scarlet bathroom suite. I doubted if this look was fashionable even way back in the late sixties when the makeover obviously took place but I was grateful that, unlike any other bathroom I’d experienced so far in life, this one was warm and had plenty of hot water on tap.

I’d lie in this bath with a fag and a cup of tea and through the top of the sash window where the glass was clear I could observe the comings and goings of our neighbours, busy in their allotments at the top of the slope. I’d wonder if it was difficult to grow a cabbage and if one day I’d end up proudly tending to an allotment myself. The prospect didn’t appeal to
me. Reflecting on the future and what it might hold was an activity we rarely indulged in, living as we did a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence. Our only care was if we were working that night and for how much. We never turned work down, no matter how poorly paid it was, our philosophy being that it was better to be out working for something than sitting at home earning nothing.

Each night and some afternoons we’d pile into the van and Phil would drive us the length and breadth of the north of England to play in venues, some of which were very pleasant. The others … well, as I said, we couldn’t afford to be fussy. In one club up on the moors in the middle of nowhere, we got ready and did our quick changes in a freezing caravan at the back of the building, and then had to run across a muddy field and through a fire door to get to the dance floor in the pouring rain. In a working men’s club near Bridlington, where we walked on and off the stage to the sound of our own feet, the tape was turned off during one of Hush’s big numbers to enable a member of the committee to announce that ‘Bingo will be commencing ten minutes after this lot have finished, so make sure you’ve got your books in.’

In spite of these setbacks and many others like them, I was enjoying myself. There was a sense of recklessness that came with this new lifestyle and I liked the peripatetic existence, travelling around the country visiting previously unexplored territory. I had very little responsibility and for once I was my own boss, not earning a lot, granted, but enough to get by on. I was in a Peter Pan frame of mind, a strangely liberating experience that led me to believe that I could be and do exactly what I liked in this new-found Yorkshire Neverland, answerable to no one, with the exception perhaps of my own personal Captain Hook: my mother.

Her immediate reaction when I rang her up to tell her that I was moving to live in Yorkshire was, not surprisingly, suspicion.

‘You’re leaving your precious London to go and live in some Yorkshire backwater surrounded by sheep?’ she shrieked, highly sceptical at this latest bit of news. ‘Well, it doesn’t take a Philadelphia lawyer to work out why.’

‘Why’s that then?’ Here it comes.

‘There’s only one reason why you’d pack up and scarper to somewhere like Yorkshire,’ she said with the triumphant finality of Hercule Poirot revealing who dun it at the conclusion of a case. ‘And that’s because the police are on your tail.’

For once I was able to tell her the truth: that I wasn’t Public Enemy Number 1, I didn’t have Scotland Yard after me and the reason I was moving back ‘oop north’ was simply because living conditions were becoming intolerable in London, the unpredictable and lengthy hours that I was expected to commit to working for Camden Council were a bind and I desperately needed a change.

‘But why Yorkshire?’ she asked, making it sound as if Yorkshire was on the other side of the world.

I told her I had the offer of a job and somewhere to live.

‘Doing what?’ She was still deeply suspicious.

‘Oh, working in pubs and clubs all over the place,’ I replied airily. It was after all near to the truth.

‘As what?’

‘Catering,’ I said without missing a beat, ignoring the image that flashed across my mind of me half naked on the dance floor of the Keighley Fun House stripping to ‘Fan-Tan-Fanny’.

‘Waiting on and working behind a bar, you mean,’ she
said flatly, unable to hide the disappointment in her voice.

‘I’ll be able to come and see you more often,’ I said optimistically, as if that little drop of oil was going to restore calm to any potentially stormy waters.

‘Well, as long as you give me plenty of notice,’ she announced grandly. ‘I’m hardly ever in these days, if I’m not up at our Sheila’s or Brendan’s I’m at Mass or the Mothers’ Union. I’m an independent woman now, you know. I can go and come as I please, you can’t expect me to hang around waiting for a visitation from you.’

I told her I’d ring her secretary and book an appointment.

‘You do that. Now you’d better get off the phone, this must be costing you a small fortune.’ My mother still thought in terms of trunk calls and considered the price of a phone call anywhere outside her immediate radius ruinous. ‘I’ll drop you a line, ta-ra.’

After I’d been living in Slaithwaite for a couple of months and as we had no work booked in for the best part of a week, I took the opportunity to pay my mother a long overdue visit. Hush went down to London to buy wigs and I caught the train to Liverpool, taking the time during the journey to consider the pros and cons of telling her what I was really doing to earn a crust.

I reasoned that turning up and then casually springing on her over a corned beef sandwich that I was part of a drag act might bring on a bit of a ‘light blue touchpaper and retire’ moment, but diluting it to cabaret act, a more acceptable title, I thought, might just soften the blow and reduce the risk of an explosion. There was no possibility of her ever coming to see me and if she wanted me to go into detail, which she more than likely would, I’d tell her I did comedy sketches and add,
just to test the water, a little bit of drag. It might go down well with her, having a cabaret artiste as a son instead of a barman. After all, she hadn’t been overjoyed at the news that I was working in catering, showing utter contempt for what she considered to be ‘waiting on people’, a reminder of her days as an overworked, underpaid slave in domestic service. One thing I was certain of, though, was that breaking the news I was a drag queen would send her apoplectic. It would sound far too
News of the World
, a paper you didn’t dare bring into the house as she called it a pornographic rag and said the only thing in it you could believe was the date.

No, if I’m going to say anything then best stick to the less subversive title of cabaret artiste, I told myself, putting it out of my mind for the moment and settling down to a bag of crisps and
Titbits
magazine.

She’d obviously just got in as she was standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil and still wearing her headscarf.

‘Is that you, Paul?’ she shouted as I let myself in at the front door. ‘You’re just in time. D’you want a cup of coffee? And a ham roll?’

It was nice to be home. I still considered this little house in Holly Grove to be ‘home’, and standing once again in the front room among all the familiar ornaments and furnishings was, as always, comfortably reassuring.

‘Jesus, look at the state of you,’ she said as I entered the lean-to kitchen, the windows steamed up from the boiling kettle. ‘You look like a bloody tramp who hasn’t washed or eaten for months.’

I couldn’t argue with that. My hair badly needed cutting and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought anything new to wear, as any spare cash went towards new costumes.
I usually slobbed about in a pair of old jeans and a dirty red, white and blue anorak I’d bought as a cheap special offer with petrol at the garage.

‘Doing well for yourself then in the catering business,’ she sniffed, looking down at my battered pair of trainers as she took out two crusty cobs. ‘D’you want mustard on your ham?’

‘Actually, I’m not in catering any more,’ I said, trying to sound cheerily optimistic and buttering her up for the bomb-shell I was considering dropping on her. ‘I’m doing something else now.’

‘You’re not that Yorkshire Ripper, are you?’ she said, watching me as I poured boiling water on to the Nescafe. ‘I always thought it odd that you moved up to Yorkshire. There had to be a good reason.’

‘No, I’m not the Yorkshire Ripper.’

‘Cos if you are then you know I’m going to have to turn you in,’ she said, sounding like the Lone Ranger and making me laugh. ‘Here, wait till I tell you this first before I forget.’ She was laughing herself now. ‘Bring those coffees through to the front and I’ll tell you.’