Writing Home (54 page)

51 A. B., January 1994

There is something of Richmal Crompton’s William (and his more than slightly irritable sister Ethel) about Mickey Wall, and also of Saki’s Bassington − a boy too self-assured and finished ever to turn into an adult. I’ve no doubt there will be some research student, maybe one of those paid-up, card-carrying members of the London Library that figure on Osborne’s hit list, who will one day sift the plays for evidences of Wall. But on to sex.

Convalescing in Cornwall after an operation for appendicitis, he finds himself alone on a beach. ‘I took off my bathing suit and began to cauterize my appendicitis wound with a stick, rather like a crayon, which I had been given for this purpose. It was six months since my operation but my scar had refused to heal and was still partially open with patches of wormy flesh protruding from it.’ The naked Osborne, poking away at his stomach, is espied by a handsome middle-aged man sunbathing in the next cove. He turns out to be a writer and asks him back to his cottage. They drink china tea out of nice cups, listen to a record of Arthur Bliss’s
Miracle in the Gorbals
and the author, J. Wood Palmer (that initial says it all), suggests Osborne stay the night. At the same time, he cheerfully warns our hero that a bit of the other is quite likely to be on the cards. Exit the author of
A
Patriot for Me
, hot and confused. But the scar, the writer, the nice cups make it all straight out of the last writer one would ever associate with Osborne – Denton Welch.

Mind you, this sort of thing is always happening to him. He’s able to drop his guard temporarily during a brief (and glorious) stint as a reporter on
Gas World
− not, one imagines, the most epicene of periodicals − but no sooner does he give up journalism than the word goes round and the forces of pederasty are on the qui vive. No rep does he join but at the first read-
through the resident Mr Roving Hands is giving him the glad eye. One is even observed fumbling him under a café table by a private detective specially hired (in Minehead!) by his fiancée’s parents. Nothing ever comes of these approaches, despite the assertions of colleagues like Gerald at Ilfracombe that ‘I didn’t know what I wanted.’ Osborne knew what he wanted all right, and he’d been wanting it for years.

‘Sex was the most unobtainable luxury in the winter of our post-war austerity.’ What passed for sex in 1947 was ‘a few snatched pelvic felicities during the quickstep, what I came later to know as a Dry Fuck on the Floor’. For the boy who, at school, did not know what a twat was, opportunity finally knocked in Llandudno, on tour with an actress called Stella. Knocked and knocked and knocked. He was nineteen, and to read back from Art to Life (
A Sense of Detachment
again), he ‘could do it nine times in the morning’. And, what is nice, five wives later he still thinks it a very worthwhile activity. ‘If I were to choose a way to die it would be after a drunken, fish-eating day, ending up at the end of the Palace pier … To shudder one’s last, thrusting, replete gasp between the sheets at four and six o’clock in Brighton would be the most perfect last earthly delight.’ Even this last, putative fuck is due for a matinée performance.

Little mothered but much married, Osborne has a complicated relationship to the opposite sex, pointed up by a happy printer’s error. For his first performance with Stella he had invested in a pair of yellow poplin pyjamas from Simpson’s. Stella, however, jumped the gun and ‘began to make love to me with alarming speed, but I was still sober and self-conscious enough to insist on going to my own room to get my pymamas.’ Once in his ‘pymamas’, he came back to bed and Stella, and burst into tears. It was some considerable time before he ceased crying, took off the pymamas and got down to the serious business of sexual intercourse.

This is a lovely book. It has jokes (‘Handing over the Hoover to my mother was like distributing highly sophisticated nuclear weapons to an underdeveloped African nation’). It is not mellow. And it constantly brings alive that remotest of periods, the recent past.