by Paul O'Grady
Rowena’s clients were mainly wealthy Arabs, playboys who dumped their wives, kids and retinues of servants into rented Kensington mansions and went off and had fun partying non-stop in hotel suites with working girls. Rowena liked her Arab punters. Money seemed to be no object and many of the girls had earned a fortune out of them. Rowena was extremely fussy. Answering the phone one busy night she was asked by a prospective client how to get to the agency by tube. Before putting the phone down she replied curtly that she only supplied to the carriage trade and not, regrettably, to men who travelled on public transport.
There wasn’t as much work as I’d been led to believe, but I’d hang round the office just in case, passing the time chatting to the girls and the two receptionists who more or less ran the place. The receptionists were strictly look but don’t touch, and although they flirted outrageously with the clients, charming the pants off them and accepting presents with cries of ‘Oh, Omar, a Cartier watch! You really shouldn’t have’, they were not for sale at any price. Despite this or maybe because of it they were in great demand and invited out to clubs and private parties in hotel suites after work nearly every night. I’d sometimes tag along, even though the likes of Tramp and the Saddle Room really weren’t my scene, because it was interesting seeing how the supposed ‘beautiful people’ lived. I preferred the parties, for not only did I get to see inside some of London’s grandest hotels but I knew that when the time came to leave it was a guaranteed dead cert that the host would shove a wad of notes in our hands for a taxi.
Vera was no longer pulling pints in the Sportsman. He too was now on the books of London Domestics and quids in thanks to a nice little earner cleaning for the wives of some of Rowena’s best customers, temporarily domiciled out of the way in Kensington mansions that only the Saudis could afford to rent. Although these beautiful houses had endless bedrooms, magnificent kitchens and an assortment of elegant drawing rooms and morning rooms, the women chose to live and sleep together with all the children in one big room, forsaking the comfortable sleeping arrangements upstairs for makeshift camp beds. The kitchens remained untouched as meals were sent in from local restaurants.
The women spent the best part of the day shopping in Harrods. They seemed to spend for spending’s sake, the proof of their many purchases piled high and mostly forgotten in the bedrooms: bedding, children’s clothes, shoes, handbags and, in one room, over two hundred duvets. The majority of this booty was still there after the women had packed up and gone home and as Vera and I had never had the pleasure of sleeping under a duvet we helped ourselves to a couple, absolving our crime by telling each other that someone else would only take them if we didn’t and that person more than likely didn’t have to sleep under blankets so old they’d aged into something resembling mummified felt. I considered my duvet compensation for the many times I’d had to clean up mounds of human excrement from the sweeping marble staircase. Vera guarded his harem with the zeal of a possessive eunuch. He didn’t want any strangers from the agency jumping on his gravy train and if extra help was required he roped either me or Angela in to help him. For something so simple as opening the front door to these women and then carrying their mountain of shopping in from the limo he was given a five hundred quid tip, so it was no wonder he was keen to keep this run of good luck to himself. Vera was the only cleaner in London I’d ever heard of who travelled to and from work by taxi and shopped in Harrods Food Hall for something for his tea.
It was an unsettling existence, washing dishes in the nursing home one day and sitting in the sun on the terrace of the Hôtel Negresco in Nice with a few of Rowena’s girls as the guest of a French Canadian diplomat the next.
Since I fancy myself as a bit of a free spirit it really galls me to admit that I actually need a routine in my life. I do now and I did then and the day to day ‘I don’t know what I’m doing or where my next penny is coming from’ lifestyle I’d been leading was getting me down. My self-esteem, to quote my aunty Chris, was lower than a worm’s tit. Salvation came in the guise of Camden Social Services who, instead of kicking the front door in and sectioning me as they probably should have, rang up one morning and offered me a job.
Six weeks earlier I’d been for an interview for a job as a peripatetic care officer. This was a service, way ahead of its time, that had originally been set up by a remarkable Irishwoman named Maura Shanahan. Usually if a parent went into hospital leaving the children without a responsible adult to look after them, there was no alternative but to admit them into care. To prevent children from having to face the trauma of a children’s home and possible separation from their siblings a peripatetic would move into the family home and care for them full time, allowing them to stay there and providing them with some normality in the face of an abnormal situation. ‘Perries’ also provided respite care, allowing an exhausted spouse or parent a much-needed break from caring for a loved one twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
I’d given up hope on the job as I hadn’t heard anything from Maura since my interview and now here she was welcoming me into the fold and asking me if it would be possible to drop everything and come down to the office as they had a major crisis on their hands, one that required someone with my expertise and experience with children to handle it. Flannel and flattery, I fall for it every time, and with Maura ladling it on with a trowel I’d have agreed to look after Wednesday and Pugsley Addams. However, the Addams kids would’ve been a pushover compared to the family of Robinsons that I found in my charge. All five of them lived in a sparsely furnished basement flat in Kentish Town that the children had reduced to a semi-derelict shell of its former self.
Their mother Nora, a violent alcoholic, had recently died of a heart attack leaving her dysfunctional brood in the care of Camden council. Maura’s policy of keeping families together was probably not the best idea for this lot. They hated each other. Margaret at fifteen was the eldest and her mother’s daughter, spiteful, manipulative and an inveterate liar. She was forever escaping out of her bedroom window and going missing. Her brother Billy, a year younger, was a moody, deeply disturbed boy, prone to attacking his siblings at the slightest provocation with the nearest sharp implement to hand. The twins, Bernadette and Clare, a duo straight out of the Village of the Damned with their pale hair and bloodless complexions, hissed and spat at each other like a pair of baby adders. Clare was a religious fanatic who stole prayer books and holy pictures from the local churches and liked to parade up and down the darkened hall in the middle of the night wearing her communion dress, muttering prayers under her breath that sounded more like incantations and dark curses, while her sister Bernadette looked silently on from the top of the stairs. It was quite a shock to unexpectedly encounter her gliding down the hall at two in the morning, the light from the stolen church candle she was carrying casting strange shadows across her pale little face, already partially obscured behind a veil she’d made from all that was left of a pair of net curtains that had once hung in the kitchen but had been torn down in yet another argument. For me the youngest child Eddie was the most difficult. His cute good looks and diminutive size made him appear a lot younger than his years and it was hard to believe until you saw him in full flow that the dimples and curls hid a hyper-violent temper and a repertoire of swear words that would shock Barnacle Bill’s parrot into silence.
Thank God for Barbara, whom I was to work alongside. She was an experienced perry, practical and patient, whom I found very easy to get on with, which was just as well considering we had to share a bedroom. Each day was like sitting on a time bomb. You never knew when the explosion would go off, and when it inevitably did all hell broke loose. I’ve seen Billy pick the television up and throw it through the window after an argument with Eddie, who wanted to watch a different channel. We went through tellies like toilet paper until eventually the office stopped giving us any more, making our evenings trying to amuse the little terrors doubly hard. One afternoon I foolishly took them to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at th
e cinema in Camden Parkway. At the point in the film when the dwarfs make their journey home singing ‘Heigh ho, heigh ho’ Eddie came swaggering across the stage, his minuscule frame casting a huge shadow across the screen as he imitated the dwarfs behind him. His response to the protests of the audience was a masturbatory gesture. Needless to say we were thrown out, the manager telling me never to darken his cinema’s doorstep with my brood again. Once outside the kids seized their chance and ran off in all directions, leaving me roaring with rage and frustration in the middle of Parkway.
As Camden didn’t pay overtime we were given time off in lieu which meant Barbara and I worked every other week, an arrangement that suited us both as you needed a week off to recover after spending 24/7 with the Robinson kids. We rarely got a night of undisturbed sleep as there was usually a drama to contend with, for as well as Clare’s nocturnal pilgrimages up and down the hall and Eddie’s hyperactivity, which allowed him to exist on half an hour’s sleep a night, there were the children’s errant fathers to deal with. Each child, apart from the twins, had a different dad who would occasionally see fit to turn up in the early hours of the morning blind drunk and feeling extremely hard done by, demanding to see their respective offspring.
There was no reasoning with these maudlin, self-righteous drunks and they invariably turned violent when refused access to the kids, who by this time were up and awake and causing merry hell. We’d ring the police, but after a while, annoyed at being called out to what they considered to be a long-running domestic dispute, they stopped coming, leaving the job of dealing with these nocturnal visits down to me.
Now, even if physically assaulted and regardless of the circumstances, Camden Social Services’ employees were not allowed to retaliate or even defend themselves, in case the assailant got hurt and consequently sued. Instead we were expected to show our identification cards and explain in a loud but reasonable voice, ‘I am a peripatetic care officer in the employ of Camden council. Please take that broken bottle you are waving out of my face and leave this instant.’
I tried the official approach once and once only, and received a slap in the mouth for my trouble. After that any drunken fathers were removed from the step by means of a smart tap over the head with a metal bin lid and a good shove from a hefty yard brush.
After three months working with the Robinsons I was beginning to feel that I was married to a woman named Barbara and together we were raising our five highly dysfunctional kids in Kentish Town squalor. Divine retribution, perhaps. But despite the Robinsons’ many shortcomings, we found ourselves really caring for those kids, although we were desperate to find them suitable foster parents so we could get the hell out of there and back to our own lives.
Each night when the kids had finally settled down we’d sit over a pot of tea or, if the day had been particularly stressful, a bottle of wine, chain smoking and planning what we would do with ourselves when we finally got our very own ‘relief of Mafeking’. Barbara’s friend Beryl, an irascible little social worker with a dry wit who believed very much in telling it like it is, would join us in these ‘at home with the Robinsons’ sessions, offering practical advice and support when our nerve endings became so frazzled that they hurt. Barbara was planning to take a trip to north-west Poland by car to deliver much-needed medication, unavailable in Communist Poland, to her sick aunt who lived in a little town called Kamién Pomorski. Beryl and I agreed to go with her, God knows why. A fortnight in Playa del Ingles lying on the beach would’ve been a more suitable way to recuperate after four months with the Robinsons than driving through Communist countries in November. However, the latter sounded more of an adventure and I duly applied for my visas and bought a Polish phrase book.
In the meantime we sat back rubbing arnica cream on our bruised shins and TCP on the teeth marks in our arms and watching, somewhat cynically by now, an endless stream of well-meaning but totally unsuitable prospective foster parents come and go. Just when we thought we’d finally got them off our hands Maura would ring to tell us that the placement had been unsuccessful as there had been some ‘difficulties’ – a euphemism for another nice home in ruins and Mr and Mrs Foster Parent on the verge of a nervous breakdown after just one night with the kids. Reluctantly, I’d pack my bag and set off for Chez Robinson, offering up a silent prayer on the bus to whichever deity would listen for some brave couple to please come along and rescue us.
Eventually, one did. Barbara and I weren’t over-keen on them. They were like the Modern Parents from Viz magazine, having read all the books on modern parenting and attended all the courses and seminars. We felt that they put the children’s disturbed behaviour down to our lack of skill. ‘What they need is love, tolerance and a kind but firm hand to guide them,’ Mr Modern Parent told me condescendingly as the kids piled into his beautiful car to be whisked off to Laura Ashley heaven in Richmond.
What they need is muzzling and a daily elephant tranquillizer, I thought privately, waving them off, hopeful that they had finally found a permanent home. No sooner was the car round the corner and out of our sight than I’m ashamed to say I turned into a lunatic, dancing and screaming exultantly like a prisoner who had just been liberated (which I had) and throwing what little was left of the crockery through what few windows remained intact. Unprofessional behaviour without doubt, but a bloody wonderful way to release four months of built-up tension.
Unfortunately the kids lasted no longer than a month in Richmond. They destroyed the house with its immaculate furnishings and were blamed for the eventual break-up of the Modern Parents’ marriage, only this time there was no going back to Kentish Town. Instead, they were split up and placed in care homes. Not a successful result, then, despite the best intentions of everyone concerned. I hope that they had a happy ending.
CHAPTER 12
A Savage Debut
ON MY WEEKS OFF FROM THE ROBINSONS I SPENT MORE OR less every night in the Black Cap with Vera. We were mad for the drag acts. It was good to see the Harlequeens again, although they’d seriously upped their game since the last time I’d watched them. They were just as funny but their costumes were now magnificent confections of beads and feathers. Apart from the Harleys our favourite act was without doubt the Disappointer Sisters, a mime act made up of three queens called Reg, Roy and Graham – known respectively as Regina Fong, Rosie Lee and Gracie Grab-it-all – who, when not treading the boards of the tiny stage in the back bar, could be found blind drunk in the front bar screaming their heads off. This was no ordinary mime act. They were slick and inventive with wonderful costumes, elevating pub mime drag into previously unexplored territory. Reg’s claim that it was always his intention to treat a pub audience as a theatre audience, crediting them with some intelligence, had certainly paid off.
He was a former dancer, a ‘West End Wendy’ who had appeared in the London production of Fiddler on the Roof and the films The Slipper and the Rose and Oh! What A Lovely War, as he never tired of reminding us. Reg was the brains behind the act, coming up with most of the ideas, choreographing the dance routines, designing the costumes and deciding who did what, making sure of course that he was always centre stage. He always wore a red wig and played the deadpan, hard-boiled member of the troupe. All in all it was a real eye-opener for me which went way beyond the clichéd image of the archetypal no-talent drag act mouthing along to ‘Big Spender’.
Our favourite show was Hollywood, a twenty-minute spot that opened as a tribute to Busby Berkeley with the trio dressed as Gold Diggers of 1933 chorines and went on to a series of impersonations of Hollywood stars before the climax of a full-blown Ziegfeld Follies type finale (on a budget of course) to the strains of ‘Hooray for Hollywood’.
As well as the headlining act there were also a drummer and an organist who accompanied the live acts and a compère, a leggy young queen called Adrella, who sang, amongst other things, ‘Three Little Fishes’.
Marc Fleming, or Aunty Flo as he was known to his regulars, was a very popular live
act, a vicious-tongued old queen with a razor-sharp wit who berated the audience, in particular his band of loyal followers who gathered around the stage in an area known as the royal enclosure. It was a brave or, rather, very foolish person who dared to heckle the mighty Flo. Apart from being a brilliant stand-up there was no one to touch him when it came to the art of the put-down.
Coachloads of tourists would stop off briefly at the Cap for a quick drink and a gawp at the queers and drag queens. Aunty Flo would delight in abusing these hapless victims.
‘Where are you from, darling?’ he’d ask sweetly.
‘Sweden.’
‘Oh, Swedes … We feed them to cattle in this country.’
Rex Jameson’s alter ego, the inimitable Mrs Shufflewick, was a drunken old slattern, the type you might have found propping up the bar of an East End pub in a battered hat and ratty old fox fur, knocking back the Guinness and regaling the customers with a salty tale of how she came to end up half naked at the back of a bus with a sailor and a fishcake for company. He’d created a three-dimensional character that was so credible I didn’t realize at first that I was watching a man and not a little old woman. When ‘Shuff’ was on form he was sheer genius, but when he was paralytic, two sips away from being incapable, as he frequently was, I found the drunken ramblings of this tiny man dressed as a dirty old lady painful to watch, some of the audience delighting in laughing at him not with him.
I’d never heard of this Mrs Shufflewick until I saw him at the Black Cap. He’d been a big star in variety, radio and TV in the fifties and sixties, but times and tastes change and thanks to his drinking and growing unreliability managements were extremely reluctant to book him. So Shuff sought work in the only places left that would have him, the drag pubs, and some of his gags always made me laugh no matter how many times he told them. For instance:
