Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  The RE teacher walked into the middle of a lesson barking, ‘I want to talk to you.’ He was stern. Despite being the vicar, he was also one of the major disciplinarians in school so he gave off mixed messages. He took me into his little office – he was the nearest we had to a school counsellor but he wasn’t very good. He asked me a few questions about my home life, so I stated the bald facts and felt a bit teary. He asked, ‘Did he …?’ and I replied, ‘Yeah … blah blah blah. Violent, blah blah blah.’ All of a sudden, the NSPCC were at the house. It was a mystery to me at the time why they arrived, nor did I have any idea of the seriousness of it. The woman, who was a mousy lady with round glasses, took me upstairs to my bedroom to speak to me on my own in private. She asked about the situation and how I felt. I was so out of touch with myself that she was talking to a cipher and I can’t imagine she got any information out of me, certainly not enough for them to be able to take action. Then we all sat down on the sofa as a family in the sitting room while the mousy lady asked me ‘Do you love your stepfather?’ and I parroted ‘Yes’, because I was sitting in front of the man who held the sword of Damocles hanging over me so I wasn’t going to reply, ‘No! He’s a fucking bastard! He’s a fucking bastard!’ This woman was going to leave but I was going to have to go on living with the old man, so I wasn’t going to say, ‘I fucking hate his guts.’ The mousy woman left and nothing else happened after that; I didn’t hear hide or hair of it again.

  I retreated more and more into the haven of my bedroom. There wasn’t a scrap of wallpaper showing in there because it was covered with pictures of aeroplanes, every sort of aeroplane. My favourites were the American 1950s and 1960s jet fighters because they were flashier than the RAF version. The British ones were always dark green; the American ones were cartoon-like, painted silver with a tiger’s mouth on the front, or a heraldic device on the side. I had dozens of model aeroplanes, made from Airfix kits. Uncle Arthur built me a special shelf for my models, but that very quickly became colonised. The pelmet, the windowsill, the table, everywhere was spread with models. By the time I was fifteen I had over a hundred. I bought all the model-making magazines and studied them, then made the models better than the kit instructions. I was avid about model building in a very detailed way. The kit was only the starting point: I would add parts to get the fine detail. It was about minutiae, realism and doing things to make the aeroplanes look worn, which was called weathering. Really painstaking. Putting in exhaust fume marks where the exhaust had stained the paint and making little scratches where the pilots had climbed into the cockpit. I would sand the bottom of the wheels to make them oval because the tyres would squash with the weight of the aeroplane.

  Model Jet Plane X92, 1999

  The guns and tanks I made models of I was having first-hand experience of in the Cadet Force. Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen the Cadet Force got me out of the house, gave me contact with guns and tanks and offered me Boy’s Own fun. I relished all the drills, the shooting, the charging around in the forest and crawling about in the undergrowth with guns pretending to fight each other. Going to camp was fantastic fun; we paid £2 for a fortnight in an army camp in Wales where we would set off on marches, race through assault courses and climb mountains. The other cadets pulled my sleeping bag off me one morning and chanted, ‘Perry, the pubeless wonder!’ I thoroughly enjoyed the Army Cadet life with its camaraderie. I was very disciplined, hard-working and physical, I was the fastest in the whole cadet force around the assault course, always looked very smart and I quickly got promoted so I decided, ‘I’m going to join the army.’ I was going to be an officer. I would do my A levels and then go to Sandhurst. I wanted that. I don’t think it would have suited me, I think I would have killed myself or somebody else – a lot of other people probably, mainly dark men, I imagine, who were milkmen. I would have picked off any milkmen at five hundred yards with a laser gun. Boom! That was my plan and my mother thought it was a very good one. If I was emotionally stunted, I didn’t need to be anything else for the army: I was ideal fodder!

  In the autumn of 1975, when I was fifteen and just after I had decided to become an officer, I stumbled across an article in the News of the World about transvestites and sex changes, with a photograph of April Ashley, a model and socialite, one of the first well-known transsexuals who had scandalously married an aristocrat. I knew now that transvestism was a phenomenon that existed. I developed the typical transvestite fantasies of waking up in the morning to discover I had become a girl. I would look longingly at schoolgirls, thinking, ‘Oh God, I wish I could dress like that.’ Newsreaders were my fantasy goal. If only I could wake up in the morning and be Anna Ford, or Sue Lawley from Nationwide with her neat hair and her trendy dresses. I began experimenting with my mum’s make-up. I paraded around the house dressed up and gazed at myself in the mirror with the make-up on. I now knew this was a transvestite occupation. I was padding out a bra with socks and borrowing a pair of tights and shoes – I could just about squeeze into my mother’s shoes. All I needed was a wig. I wanted a wig because I had a skinhead haircut. The rebellious group of lads I’d fallen in with, all of whom had skinheads, had persuaded me to go to the barber with them to have a Number 2 – my mother was horrified and, because I was thin, she called me Belsen Annie.

  In the back pages of the Daily Mail there were adverts for cut-price wigs. For some reason, God knows what, I fancied being auburn so I ordered an auburn wig in a bob hairstyle. I paid £1 – I couldn’t believe a wig was so cheap. It must have been awful for a quid. I thought, ‘How am I going to send off for one? I can’t have one delivered to the house.’ I told my best friend, Tom Edwards, that I was buying a Christmas present for my mum but wanted it to be a surprise. I addressed the wig to the Edwardses’ house and one week later Tom gave me a parcel at the bus stop. Finally, I had a complete outfit.

  As soon as I learned the word transvestite, I researched it in the psychology books in Chelmsford library. There was a noted textbook called Sexual Deviations that included a couple of case studies. I looked up ‘transvestite’ and read. I learned that going out dressed up was one of the things cross-dressers did. On 5 November 1975, which I now call Claire’s birthday, I put on the full rig and stepped out of the front door. There I stood in my lipstick, blue chiffon headscarf over my auburn wig, a brown polyester blouse and black-and-white dog-tooth check skirt, tan tights, black court shoes and a beige mac: a middle-aged look. ‘She’ was I, Grayson, she had no name, she wasn’t yet Claire. It was thrilling. It was icily cold and the cold still has an erotic charge for me because of that day. My sex drive takes a leap when the temperature drops; it is conditioned by those early experiences. For some silly reason Transvestite Day is 4 August whereas it should be something like 27 January. Winter is the trannie season because it’s chilly, you’re wearing a wig and lots of padding, which is hot; it’s also dark so you can sneak out of the house without the neighbours seeing, and you can cover up with a coat.

  At nine o’clock in the morning, taking enormous risks, I walked down our lane, round the village, then back home and I was on cloud nine, having the time of my life. It was the most exhilarating thing I had ever done. As I couldn’t see myself in the mirror while I was walking through the village, the cliché of the nippy air round my legs along with the physical feeling of wearing uncomfortable shoes constantly reminded me that I was wearing cramped, female clothes. The perfect transvestite experience would be traipsing along the street with someone holding a gigantic mirror in front of me so that I could see myself the whole time and know exactly what I looked like. As I can’t watch myself, wearing crippling shoes, being a tad cold or having unusual physical sensations from my outfit remind me that I’m in the wrong clothes. It accentuates the difference.

  Even though I had learned I was a transvestite, I was realising I was wholly heterosexual and was fantasising about girls but, because I went to an all-boys school, girls were foreign territory and petrifying. At primary school a girl had
pinned me down in the playground and kissed me, and I remember thinking later on, ‘Oh God! I didn’t take enough advantage of that situation.’ When my sister had her tenth birthday party all her friends arrived wearing their party togs; this was the early seventies and a little-girl look was fashionable. One of the guests wore a blue-and-yellow, little-girl-style Crimplene dress with pretty cherries on it. I saw that dress and fell utterly in love with it. When we played Murder in the Dark I had a surreptitious feel of her frock, I couldn’t help myself whispering, ‘Ohhhhhhh!’ It was electrifying and I desperately wanted that dress. She looked sweet in it and I wanted to be her.

  10

  I WAS DOROTHY, SHE WAS THE WHIRLWIND

  A SCHOOL FRIEND asked me, ‘Is your dad Derek Perry? When I said he was he went on, ‘I’m going out with his adopted daughter.’

  I thought, ‘That’s interesting.’ I didn’t know anything about my father, not even where he was living; I hadn’t seen him since I was seven and now I was fifteen. My father wasn’t someone I knew any more, he was a mythic, hazy figure who wasn’t my stepfather and who hopefully offered to fill the hero’s role, the Alan Measles role. In my teenage brain I thought, ‘My father might offer me a way out of my situation. He might rescue me.’

  I arranged to meet my father’s adopted daughter and one lunchtime I went with her to my father’s house. There I met his second wife, Maureen-Ann, and I told her, ‘I’d like to meet my father again.’ Maureen-Ann was friendly, perhaps she was surprised by my visit, I don’t know, because I saw the unfolding of events from my point of view, not thinking of the import and impact my appearance would have. I was in an intolerable situation, my home life and my sexuality were pressing in on me, I was taking wild measures, so going to see Maureen-Ann seemed inconsequential.

  The following Saturday I told my mother, ‘I’ve got a hockey match today,’ but instead of playing hockey, I went to meet my father. I couldn’t tell my mother where I was going because my father’s name was mud in her house. I arrived at his home in Chelmsford, this skinny, shaven-headed teenager in Doc Martens and a combat jacket, a tuff-stuff carapace but all wet inside, for my first meeting with him in eight years. He was in bed. I walked into his bedroom, mumbling, ‘Oh, hello.’ He wasn’t King of All the Universe, Alan Measles. There was a huge gulf between the attention I wanted from him and the attention he could give me. We spent the day together tinkering around with his old Bedford van – a very Derek Perry scenario: he was always tinkering around with cars. On the way home I dirtied my hockey kit on a piece of muddy ground so that it looked as if I’d worn it.

  Meanwhile, that autumn my stepfather had decided to build a house in a village called Great Bardfield so he bought a fourteen-acre field that used to be a chicken farm and got planning permission to build a big house in this field. By early December our house was sold, we were already beginning to pack and soon we were all going to move into two caravans in the field while the house was built. My stepfather also wanted to buy the local newsagent’s business in which the whole family would have to be involved. The deadline was looming. It was a horrific thought, moving just before Christmas into a small caravan in a wet field next to a building site, two hours from my school and my friends. My needs were down at the bottom of a long, long list of other considerations. Part of me was shouting, ‘Get out of here. No one gives a shit about what you feel.’

  I arranged to stay the weekend with my father because I was observing his house, thinking, ‘Here’s a lifeboat, I’m going to leap into it.’ I took my army bag with my uniform, pretending to my mother that I was going away with the Cadet Force – I was getting quite deceitful. That weekend my father took me for an Indian, which was the first time I had eaten in a proper restaurant, and he got me drunk on Irish coffees. I had a nice time. My father’s house seemed a more liberal and relaxed household. I don’t know what he thought, I don’t think he realised how oppressive it felt at home because I wouldn’t have been at all communicative about how violent I felt my stepfather was and how frightened I was.

  One evening in early December when we were on the very brink of moving into the caravans, I casually mentioned to my mother that I’d seen my father recently. She started shouting and screaming, and was incredibly angry. There was a lot of ‘After all these years … blah, blah, blah and you want to … blah, blah, blah’. So I was sucked into her vortex of drama: I was Dorothy, she was the whirlwind. As soon as I mentioned that I’d seen my father she shrieked, ‘And I suppose you want to go and live with him?’

  She suggested it and I floundered, ‘Well, yeah. I would.’

  She made the decision for me. She exclaimed, ‘Right then! We’ll pack!’ She demanded my father’s telephone number and although she’d had no contact with him or Maureen-Ann, she rang their house – my father wasn’t even there – announcing, ‘Right! I’m bringing Grayson over. He’s coming to live with you.’ Within half an hour she was driving me to my father’s. We rustled together my clothes, of which there weren’t many, she drove me into Chelmsford and left me at the top of the street where my father lived – she didn’t even drive me up to the house – and then drove away. It was a very cold, frosty night.

  There I was, dumped and shell-shocked – I’d only seen my father twice in eight years, both times at my suggestion. I walked down the road carrying my holdall and there I was, completely numb, at my father’s front door. I arrived in this other household in rather a hurry. I was put into the lodger’s room; I can’t imagine the lodger was very happy having the son plonked in his room. My father came back the next day and dealt with it, God knows how. We got by. There were a few tearful phone calls from my mother, but she didn’t ask me to come back.

  My father lived in a very cramped, overcrowded end-of-terrace council house in Chelmsford. He had taken it upon himself to rescue and adopt Maureen-Ann’s children, whom she had let go of and who were almost the same age as my sister and I. He found the daughter, Belinda, dirty and unkempt, in a squalid flat in Sheffield in atrocious conditions: ‘Like the third world,’ he claimed. Next he collected the son, Pete, from a children’s home. My father had then set up home with Maureen-Ann and his adopted children. My grandfather, a gentle soul, was living with him as well because his wife had an affair and divorced him when they were both pensioners. My grandfather had one room, which he shared with his blaring black-and-white telly, Belinda had another, Maureen-Ann and my father had the largest bedroom and the lodger and I shared the box room. The box room was previously the son’s room – Pete was a hippy who had moved to Brighton. He was legendary because he was caught growing cannabis on the railway embankment behind the terrace causing the police to raid the house. Pete’s old room was a hippy’s fantasy drug room. It had carpet on one wall and silver foil on the other. There were peacock feathers, Hendrix posters and sculptures made from wig heads, but as it was 1975 and the birth of punk, this hippy room with its black ceiling decorated with fluorescent stars seemed almost old-fashioned and nostalgic. It was very oppressive.

  Charlie, the lodger, was Pete’s friend. He worked on a burger van at night and slept in the day, which meant that we weren’t on top of each other because when he was out I was in. There were also Maureen-Ann’s two skinny, yappy, shivery Chihuahuas with their bulging eyes skipping around the house. I always hated Chihuahuas.

  As soon as I moved into the box room I became utterly obsessed, in my teenage mind, with getting hold of some women’s clothes. The transvestite urge was powerful. It was fresh, novel, exciting but it had been nipped in the bud by the move, the resulting upheaval and my limited access to privacy. Being in this busy little council house that was never empty, that always had someone in it, I was never going to be able to dress up there. How was I going to dress? I started hatching plans.

  I began scoping public spaces all over Chelmsford for discreet toilets. I was assessing them for privacy, infrequency of use, lighting and whether there was a mirror. The best toilets I found were behind Chelmsford m
useum. They were 1930s public conveniences, underused and covered with bushes. I packed all my women’s stuff into my Adidas bag, including the stash of women’s clothes that I’d borrowed from my mother. I had the rudiments; I had shoes, and some old make-up I had found in my mother’s chest of drawers and my auburn wig. I went through Maureen-Ann’s wardrobe: unfortunately she was a small woman and I was already quite a large boy. I borrowed one of her dresses that would have been entirely inappropriate and out of fashion by then: she clung on to the miniskirt longer than most people did, so her dresses were extremely short. There was a tweed cape and I borrowed that too. I shoved all this stuff into my Adidas bag, then cycled to Central Park in Chelmsford after school, sneaked into the women’s lavatory, dressed up and tottered round the park. I hid my bag in the bushes, which in itself was a dangerous thing to do, because if it had been stolen while I was walking about … I was freezing and probably looked like a prostitute in the miniskirt. I had a bad auburn wig on and cheap make-up applied in a freezing cold toilet, but I was soft of feature and very slender, and I would have looked quite feminine. I wandered around Central Park for a little while, then got changed back, and I realised I’d got away with it and it had worked.

  I kept on dressing up and it became an overriding obsession. I developed a strategy that ensured I always came out of the appropriate toilet. Emerge from the men’s toilet dressed as a man and from the women’s toilet as a woman – that’s how I did it tactically. I dressed up half a dozen times over the next month or two. It was always perishingly cold. Although it was the middle of winter in a stinky little public toilet in a park, the cold was exciting as I was constantly aware of not wearing enough clothes and having exposed legs in my tights.

  I became bolder and started wandering down into Chelmsford. I bought some make-up at a chemist’s and I wasn’t hassled. I don’t think people could work me out: I probably looked like an odd young woman in a wig, or a mad, slightly druggy prostitute. I would have been a tall, gangly woman in too short an outfit for a chilly midwinter day and not fashionable in the slightest. Luckily, I had blond hair on my legs so I didn’t have to walk about looking like a gorilla. The skirts by early 1976 had got longer but I was wearing Maureen-Ann’s older clothes, not those she was using at the time because that seemed too risky. I was wearing clothing from the back of her wardrobe that I never saw her in, cute minidresses and the mini cape, which was also very short.