Gay Life, Straight Work

by Donald West

  My next contact with him, at age twenty-two, was more disconcerting. He had failed to settle down in work and he was on remand in prison, having pleaded guilty to charges relating to dangerous driving, assault on police and possessing a weapon. While there, he informed a former colleague from Maudsley, who had interviewed him on behalf of the prison medical service, that he was suffering from homicidal impulses against boys for which he needed treatment. I was asked to see him and prepare a report. He told me that since (what he perceived as) rejection by Finchden Manor, he was feeling a compulsion “to take it out on someone” that centred on shooting a boy and cutting up his body. He had procured a revolver and made the acquaintance of a boy of twelve and arranged a rendezvous. He was forestalled by the boy’s father who had become suspicious and arrived to beat him up. There was a fight, after which he drove off with the gun in the car driving round furiously. The police gave chase and he crashed the car. When the police tried to arrest him he threatened them with an air gun (not a revolver!). He denied homosexual or paedophile impulses and mentioned making murderous threats against a man for attempting sexual advances.

  In the absence of independent information, it was impossible to know for certain how much of this gratuitous confession was fantasy, but in view of his obvious character disorder and the serious nature of his statements I and my colleague both agreed he should be detained for psychiatric investigation and treatment. Because no municipal mental hospital could be found willing to take him, and at the instigation of his own legal advisors, he was committed to Broadmoor Hospital as a criminal patient, from whence he could not expect to be discharged unless the doctors declared him no longer dangerous.

  For some years I heard no more until the consultant in charge of his care at Broadmoor, finding that I had known him earlier, asked me to see him. I was disappointed that years had passed without any concrete evidence as to the reliability of the story responsible for his detention, now residing in the medical records. He appeared well-groomed, calmer and more confident. He still maintained that he had been in a dangerous frame of mind previously, but that he had now accepted his homosexuality and was finding satisfaction in relationships with men his own age or slightly younger. He still had sexual fantasies of bondage and domination, but between consenting participants. Other than his pursuit of pornography there were no complaints of his social behaviour. His ideas about career prospects outside hospital seemed fanciful and unrealistic.

  The superintendent of Broadmoor had told me that release decisions were especially difficult when they had to assess the risk of sexual fantasy being acted out. I ventured a bold suggestion: “He is still a vulnerable personality who defends himself with a glib façade against facing problems squarely. Within the confines of the institution it will never be possible to be sure that one can trust his own description of his sexual feelings, but his present tolerance of adult homosexuality and his known conduct with men his own age do point to a real change. This is perhaps an optimum time for attempting a graded release, before he is too old to make the re-adjustment, and while he is showing some favourable changes”.

  When his discharge was ordered he wrote me a fulsome letter with a typically grandiloquent invitation: “I write really as an old acquaintance rather than a past patient, hoping to keep everything informal and friendly, and indeed, it is my hope that when I do arrive in the near future, you will at least accept my hospitality and thanks on a more personal basis, and share a nice dinner in a good restaurant with me, over a bottle of good red wine or whatever you fancy”. This event did not materialise, but three years later his former doctor at Broadnoor sent me a copy of a letter received from him in response to an invitation to a follow-up interview. Rupert had replied: “I’ll have to think about that one … I find I have developed a very healthy aversion to bolts and bars (I won’t have them in the house)”. He proceeded to give ‘news’ of his dramatic doings in the past few years. Among much else this included: “I’ve been to Germany, got chucked out for representing a GI at his Court Martial as his Defence attorney (contrary to visitor’s passport you see, but I got paid $200 a day for it) … arrived back in time for a murder hunt (not guilty M’Lud) and cleared off when my Broadmoor past was picked up by the local newspaper (Oh, sensational stuff all right) having got into a nice old tangle with the Special Branch – something about gun-running…”. Regarding sex: “I have no troubles in that direction at all. In fact, I find that being a homosexual really doesn’t bother ME at all, though it does seem to give some of my acquaintances a headache”. One can only hope that with increasing age he has calmed down and found some reasonable niche for himself. At least he seems not to have caused a national scandal to add to the tally of Mental Health Service disasters. I have set out the story at some length because it illustrates some of the problems psychiatrists face in dealing with so-called psychopaths. Diagnosis depends on detailed assessment of behaviour over a long period, but faced with an uninhibited liar one is dependent on reliable information from outside sources. Communication between different services – such as police, social and probation services and criminal records – is essential. In this example the decision to release from Broadmoor was based on judgement as to the unlikelihood of (supposedly past) sexual fantasies being acted upon in real life. It was a judgement made in the absence of confirmation of the patient’s confessional statements. The question of when sexual fantasies become truly dangerous is a live issue today when so many men are caught downloading paedophilic pornography from the internet and psychiatrists are called upon to pronounce upon the risk that they will progress to child molestation.

  Moving on

  After a year or two on Peter Scott’s unit one was expected to move on, so it was no surprise to be summoned by the big chief, Aubrey Lewis, who wanted to discuss my plans. On hearing that I hoped to obtain a consultant post he looked dubious and said he supposed my interests were more in the direction of research. He probably knew or guessed I was a homosexual and thought this might prove an impediment or an embarrassment in clinical work, as indeed I had already experienced in the incident at the Marlborough Clinic. He went on to tell me he had had a conversation with a professor who was setting up an Institute of Criminology in Cambridge University and wanted to recruit a psychiatrist. This was Leon Radzinowicz, a lawyer who had authored a book on sexual offenders, and to whom I had once written soliciting sources of information on continental sex laws. (Actually the book was almost entirely the work of his the assistant, Derek McClintock, but I did not know that at the time). Doubtless their conversation had taken place at the prestigious Athenaeum Club to which both belonged. Aubrey remarked, I suspect disingenuously, that at the time no suggestion came to his mind, but if the idea interested me I should contact Radzinowicz.

  The hint was virtually a command. I complied promptly and in the course of time received an invitation to an interview at the Athenaeum. On arrival, Radzinowiz remarked “I don’t suppose you know this place”, to which I replied that I had been there a few weeks before. (This was true, and I think he was impressed, although in fact I have hardly ever been there since and I cannot now remember who I was with). He asked about educational experience and seemed satisfied on the mention of Merchant Taylors’ School. He was doubtless thinking of the better known and classier public school, which was the southern branch, rather than the school in Crosby. The interview seemed to be going well and he spent time telling me of the good prospects at his Institute where I should have freedom to develop my research interests. He did not mention that, unknown to me, he had already virtually promised the job to another Maudsley candidate, Alan Bartholomew. Fortunately Alan secured a better position in Australia, where he became the leading forensic psychiatrist.

  Finally came the question: “Is there anything else you have to tell me about?” to which I replied as blandly as possible “No, I don’t think so”. I had been prepared for this. My friendly publisher, Mervyn Horder, an alumnus of Trinity College, Cambrid
ge, where Radzinowicz was a Fellow, had dined there recently and had a conversation during which Radzinowicz had asked him about me and been told I was living with Pietro. I was then aged thirty-five and Radzinowicz must have drawn the obvious conclusion. Nothing more was said then, but in later years Radzinowicz would ask after “your friend” and even took the trouble to invite him to Trinity College, where the then Master (R.A.Butler) showed Pietro round his famous collection of paintings in the Master’s Lodge.

  LOVE VERSUS SEX

  Starting a Partnership

  While still at the Marlborough clinic I met Pietro on the back row of the popular newsreel and cartoon cinema in Piccadilly Circus. It was known for between-male fumbling, but not so brazen as the notorious Biograph cinema near Victoria Station, where few of the predominantly male audience paid attention to the films and the door to the toilet was constantly creaking open and shut. I was almost thirty and Pietro, a handsome, dark haired Italian, was eight years younger. He came home with me and we enjoyed a passionate time. He was not put off by the presence of my old sex mate and flat mate John, but this lack of jealousy was to prove illusory, and our incompatibility on this score was to blight our lives for years to come. The first flush of ‘love’ apparently overwhelmed all other considerations. He soon quit his lodgings to come to my bed. Soon after, he was obliged to pay a short visit to his parents. When he did not return as soon as expected, in great anxiety I took off on impulse for Italy, only to find on arriving at his astonished parents’ house that he had just left to return to London.

  Pietro had vague pretensions to distant aristocratic lineage. His father had been chief of the police attached to the court of Victor Emmanuel III. The family fortunes disappeared during the Second World War, with the destruction of their home by the invading Germans, the deaths on military service of two brothers and the profligacy of his third surviving brother. He was an unexpectedly late addition to the family. By the time I met him his elderly parents were living in greatly reduced circumstances. His decision to seek work in England had been influenced by a flirtation after the war with one of the many servicemen of the American occupation. Under the regulations in force at that time, British work permits for foreigners were obtainable only in the catering trade or the coal mines. Having started off as a waiter at the Gloucester Hotel in Weymouth, once the summer palace of George III, he was now on shift work at the Colony, a fashionable West End restaurant. Although not lacking in muscular strength and vigour, he had had kidney disease in youth, suffered bouts of renal colic, and later on developed coronary disease with severe angina. He was finding the shift work at the Colony irksome and exhausting and, yet again, my father stepped in to help and secured him a place at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane, where he was much happier and his Italian charm was popular with clients, including celebrities such as the ageing singer Gracie Fields and her Italian husband.

  By this time I had acquired my first car, a Ford ‘Popular’, at the low range of the market, but effective. Sometimes I would use it to collect Pietro after work, waiting in the small hours in the street behind the hotel, watching the waiters emerging from the service entrance carrying parcels of food, presumably left-overs from rich dinners. We had a kitten given to me by a patient. It benefited from the tit-bits of meat and game that Pietro used to bring home. I never ventured into the hotel myself when fetching him, except once, when I brought the cat with me. Pietro had been chatting with a hotel guest (Lady Ellerman, of shipping line fame) and had mentioned the cat and she asked to see it. Accordingly, we carried it up to the luxurious suite she occupied, where it promptly began clawing the Aubusson carpet. I was horrified, but she was just amused, saying “Let the little thing play”. This trivial incident stuck in my mind as emblematic of the freedom of the rich. Pietro worked at that hotel until his period of directed labour expired and he could take up whatever work he might find.

  Before the enforced departure from the SPR flat in 1956, after much searching, I found accommodation for Pietro and myself and my two remaining lodgers in Rosslyn Hill, a busy shopping street in Hampstead. The lease was for sale at a very modest price. The previous occupant had killed herself, using an unlit gas oven. The flat occupied two stories in a tall building, with more floors above, two small shops on the ground floor and a reinforced basement that had served as an air raid shelter during the war. After moving in, I was able to purchase the freehold of the whole building for what today would be an absurdly low price – perhaps because the top floor was occupied by communists on a tiny, fixed rent. In return for a modest payment they agreed eventually to leave.

  The relationship with Pietro having become the most important thing in life, I tried to devise an arrangement that would keep us together and provide a social cover for our association. In the Fifties, inexpensive coffee bars were popular among young people and the Hampstead basement, which had just become vacant, seemed just the right place for one. As owner of what would count as a catering business, I could apply for a work permit to employ Pietro. On leaving hotel work, he could run the coffee bar. After an anxious wait, and the intervention of an SPR member with political connections, the permit was refused, but a better opportunity arose.

  One of the social workers at the Marlborough clinic mentioned to me that her hobby was buying and selling antique furniture. I suggested our basement as a place for keeping her goods. She became bored with the enterprise rather quickly, and as Pietro’s period of directed labour was coming to an end, and he had some knowledge of antiques, I proposed that we open a tiny antiques shop together, with me the sleeping partner – in both senses of the word. Work began even before Pietro left shift work at the Dorchester. Hedda Carington, widow of the psychical researcher mentioned previously, who had come to the rescue once before when I was ill, acted as temporary shop minder. She was a Bohemian character, but a very loving, loyal friend. I recall her draped in a home-knitted black cape, riding a motor cycle or driving an open-air car with a pet raven circling above, to the astonishment of bystanders. Daughter of a German judge, she had been questioned by the Gestapo on account of her known dissident associations and fled across mountains into Czechoslovakia to rendezvous with and marry Whately Carington. She was a gifted artist and potter who went on exhibiting till a late age. There was no need to ‘come out’ to her as a gay couple, her unspoken acceptance was clear.

  As the years went by, one after the other the ground floor shops became vacant and we expanded into them. We named the business Pilgrim’s Place Antiques, after the covered way that led under the house to cottages belonging to the Rosslyn Hill Chapel next door. It sounded romantic, but actually Pilgrim was the builder responsible for the row of buildings erected in the late nineteenth century. For Pietro it was a full time occupation. The occasions we attended auctions together, or made excursions to the countryside looking for bargains in local second-hand shops, were for me very happy times. The informality of our arrangements included having customers sometimes coming up to our sitting-room on the first floor. Ornaments and furniture that were admired, even the dining table, were apt to become stock and sold off. Our activity made a tiny profit, but that was not its main purpose. It kept us together and long after going to work in Cambridge in 1960 I was still able to participate in some buying excursions (charged as shop expenses!), help with the book-keeping and tax returns and occasionally mind the shop on Saturday mornings, when Pietro ran a stall at Portobello Market.

  Contact with the low end of the antiques market was an interesting experience. People would bring to stallholders at Portobello articles for sale of dubious provenance. So-called ‘runners’ had no shop of their own, but having acquired something from one shop or stall that they knew another would likely be interested in, they would carry it around offering it for sale. One Saturday a man brought Pietro a jug with a small crack that he recognised immediately as coming from his shop. He asked to be allowed to hang onto it for a few minutes while he consulted a friend about its value. He phoned h
ome and asked me to look on the shelf where it had been. The gap was evident. When the man returned he quickly fled when Pietro said he knew where the jug had come from.

  Some dealers’ houses were Aladdin’s caves full of items hoarded over the years that they did not like to part with. Some were moonlighting from other jobs or dealing more as a hobby than as fulltime life-supporting work. Some pretended not to be dealers, but continually stacked their homes with goods that they sold off periodically. We became friends with a lesbian couple who ran an antiques and restaurant business in the countryside, one of them with impressively aristocratic relatives. Their situation reminded me of the eighteenth century ‘Ladies of Llangollen’. We frequently bought items for resale from them. It was common practice for dealers to buy from each other as sale prices increased substantially when items reached more fashionable areas or shops dealing in a specialised range, such as oriental ceramics or antique clocks. At one well-known London auction house we got to know one of the porters who had an antiques shop of his own in Brighton. He would alert his friends when some interesting items, perhaps hidden among a mixed lot, were coming up. There were also groups of dealers who would keep prices down by agreeing in advance not to bid against each other, but afterwards auction off the spoils among themselves. Shopkeepers handling an indiscriminate medley of goods had limited ability to authenticate and date the objects they had on sale. I once told a customer I should not be an assistant in a modest little shop if I possessed the information he was wanting.