by Rupert Smith
‘How’s your latest flame?’ I asked in a matey tone.
‘She’s great, yeah,’ he replied, already slurring.
‘She’s really sexy.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Oh yes. Best-looking girl in her year. Everyone says so. You’re a very lucky man.’
‘I wish.’
‘Everyone’s jealous of you and her.’
‘Really? Well they’ve got no reason to be. Give me that bottle again.’
‘Keep it. Why, what’s the problem.’
‘She’s frigid, isn’t she?’
Somehow I’d seen this coming. Half the boys at school made the same complaint; by their account, uncooperative girls were either frigid or lesbians.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She won’t, you know. I ought to just make her.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’d show her.’
It was the moment I’d been waiting for. It had been easier than I’d expected. I reached out for the brandy.
‘Here, give me a swig.’
As I grasped the bottle, Nutter grabbed my hand. It was then that I allowed him to seduce me.
I remember my first sexual encounter as something beautiful – two young men, friends and comrades, fulfilling the unspoken love that had always existed between them. In the short term, however, the results were disastrous. After I’d led him back to his house and deposited him half-conscious, I heard nothing more from him.
But as I’ve found so many times, a door never closes without somewhere someone opening a window. And so it happened that, hot on the heels of my first great love, I embarked on a second, more mature relationship – with a woman.
I’m getting ahead of myself again. Before the summer holidays that officially liberated me from school, there was the final week of celebration. Sports day passed off without incident – only a slight disappointment that Nutter, a hot favourite in the 1500 metres, had once again failed to show up. And then it was my turn to be in the spotlight with the long awaited, for-one-night-only production of Orphée.
The headmaster had taken his eye off the ball at a very early stage in rehearsals. Never having heard of Jean Cocteau, he assumed that Mr Phillips’s latest whim was to revive a dusty fragment of classical drama, a genre from which no danger could be anticipated. He’d sat in on our first read-through, dozing intermittently as I intoned Orpheus’s bizarre fragments of poetry with as little expression as possible. When it was over he clapped his hands, muttered, ‘Splendid, splendid,’ and disappeared to the staff room. But, as he was to learn, words alone do not theatre make.
By the time Phyllis’s advanced staging ideas had finished with Orphée, there was little trace left of the poetic niceties of Monsieur Cocteau. The curtain rose on a chorus of’ Death Angels’, a selection of the football team’s more robust members who had been drilled and bribed by Phyllis with surreptitious alcohol. They stood in line, their uniform leather jackets, caps, boots and white cotton jockstraps matching the Cocteauesque frieze that Phyllis had executed across the rear wall. Any reaction from the audience (parents, governors, local journalists and school-leavers) was drowned by the deafening chunk of Götterdämmerung blasting over the antiquated PA.
The Death Angels dispersed upstage to be succeeded by a secondary chorus of Maenads – six girls whom I had recruited from the Golden Egg – whose role consisted of running around the stage in a screaming frenzy then collapsing at the foot of a flight of stairs. It was down these stairs that I made my entrance, hoisted from the top of a concealed and very rickety stepladder by the unseen Mr Phillips. Wagner faded into silence as I processed down the steps, trailing a long white toga behind me, a lyre (of spray-painted plywood) clutched to my chest. There was total calm for a moment as the audience watched, spellbound.
Suddenly, with a scream, the Maenads arose and attacked, fighting me to the floor (with more force than was strictly necessary) and symbolically ripping me to shreds – a preliminary re-enactment of the classical myth, said Phyllis. When the sated nymphs finally dispersed, I was revealed, naked save for a flesh-coloured pouch, covered in stage blood which had been applied during the ruck. I staggered downstage, my broken lyre hanging together by a few pitiful strings, before adopting a crucifixion pose as the Death Angels bore me off into the wings to be sponged down by Mr Phillips.
I never performed on that stage again. I could vaguely hear the shouts from the audience, the stamping of feet and scraping of chairs as people rushed for the exits. Phyllis, I think, had seen it coming, squeezed my hand and said, ‘Looks like we’ve done it again, dear boy.’ Those were his final words before the headmaster dragged him off, shouting insane threats about the police.
The dressing room and auditorium emptied as if by magic. What was this force that could terrify as well as delight? As I wandered around the empty school hall, I dimly perceived that the evening had been a triumph as well as a disaster, that sometimes it was the duty of the artist to shock as well as to entertain. It was my first experience of political theatre, a movement for which I would later become a figurehead.
Empty? So I thought. But I was not alone. Still sitting in the back row was a young woman – a girl – watching my every move. I strained to see her, this quiet creature who had witnessed my solitary meditations, but as I approached she made to flee the hall. ‘Stop!’ I commanded, still in character. She stopped. ‘Come here!’ She came, head bowed, a humble votary at the altar of art.
And she looked strangely familiar. ‘Who are you, child?’ I coaxed.
‘Sue Cole. And I thought you were brilliant.’ I bowed and bestowed a smile on her which, I noticed, made her blush.
‘I will never set foot in this building again,’ I announced, leading her by the hand as I made a valedictory tour of the theatre that had been my second home for so long, touching the curtains, the windows, the chairs in mute farewell. But all the while I was wondering ‘Sue Cole? Sue Cole? Why is that name so familiar?’ As I reached the stage and prepared to deliver an impromptu eulogy to my school days, I was struck dumb by the realization: she was Nutter’s sister.
I had been dimly aware of another child around the house during the long afternoons that I spent with Nutter, a sort of shadow that he occasionally referred to as his sister. But beyond that I had no memory of her – this child, now nearly a woman. Nutter never spoke of her. But then I began to realize that she had been there all along – Sue peeping into the living room as we listened to Elvis, Sue squirreling away the empties so we wouldn’t be discovered by Nutter’s mum, Sue taking charge of Nutter when I brought him home drunk from our cross-country run. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Sue had been Nutter’s guardian angel, a small, luminous presence who watched over her brother and his friends, never pushing herself into the limelight, just quietly watching and loving.
It also occurred to me that, as Nutter had refused to speak to me on the phone, refused to answer the door when I rang, ignored all my letters and even left my gifts unacknowledged, that Sue could be the peacemaker, the bridge-builder.
There was silence between us as I stood on the stage looking into her upturned face, my speech suspended by a series of rapid, profound calculations. ‘Please, go on talking,’ said Sue. ‘I could listen to you forever.’ How had I been unaware of her beauty for so long? I jumped down from the stage, leaving the insanity of Phyllis and his infernal visions behind me, and descended feet-first to the real world of men and women. I took her hands in mine and, holding her gaze, asked her to go out with me.
I learned a lot from Sue that summer, not only about her brother – who, it seemed, was hastening his departure to London having got a girl pregnant. But also I learned about myself – the Mark that others saw. Unwillingly, Sue told me the terrible rumours that had gained currency around the town: that I was Mr Phillips’s ‘bum chum’, that I was in love with Nutter and had tried to seduce him. They painted my mother as an alcoholic and my father as a pitifu
l bar prop who couldn’t control his wife and son.
Well, I thought, I’ll show them. Part of me wanted to leave, to turn my back on everyone and let them think what they wanted. But there was another part of me – the better part? – that was determined to make them eat their words. Besides, where else could I go? At least I still had a bed at my parents’ house – although it hadn’t been a home for many years.
So Sue and I began to go out together. She was a popular girl, with lots of friends who spent most of the summer holiday organizing parties and going to dances. And we went to every single one of them. We were always the first to start the dancing, the last to leave the floor when Sue would shyly suggest that we ‘go somewhere’ to kiss. Her passion surprised me, and also her mania for secrecy. Not for me the privacy of the bedroom or the alleyway – if we were lovers, let the world know!
After we had been going out for a week, I took Sue home to meet my parents. Her quiet charm won them over immediately; nothing was too much trouble. Strange how quickly they changed from the distant, troubled figures of my adolescence to warm, companionable adults offering lifts home and extra pocket money My father was so eager to put the car at our disposal that soon I had him waiting for us from the moment we arrived at a party until the time we decided to leave. As the summer progressed, we stayed out later and later.
The welcome was not so cordial chez Cole. I was reluctant to visit, and finally Sue had to insist. Nutter was not at home, which came as no surprise. But evidence of his feckless existence was everywhere – the scattered record sleeves (among them the recent, unacknowledged gifts from me), the crushed clothes, the empty cigarette cartons. But never Nutter himself. Why was he avoiding me? Why, now that I had proved to everyone else that I was a normal, healthy teenager? What was it that he feared from me – or from himself?
Sue’s agenda for our relationship was different from mine. I was shocked by the rapidity with which she changed from an innocent, blushing schoolgirl barely on the brink of womanhood to an irrational, clinging creature who watched my every move like a hawk. Her demands became ridiculous, rapacious. Although younger than me, she was as sexually precocious as her brother, expecting the physical side of our relationship to be consummated within a matter of weeks. Finally the ugly truth came out.
‘Why won’t you do it?’ she asked, her face a mask of exasperation, as we broke from a long-held kiss during which she’d manoeuvred my hand to her breast.
‘You’re only fifteen,’ I replied.
‘So what?’
‘I don’t want to spoil you.’
‘I want you to.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘All the girls have done it.’
I was shocked, although hardly surprised.
‘And they say that if we don’t do it soon it’s because you’re a . . . you know.’
So that was it. I was an experiment, a subject for discussion between Sue and her friends. Without further words, I left the house, pausing only to collect a few of the more expensive records I had lent to Nutter. Sue, Nutter, the whole clan of Coles, were out of my life.
But there was one final confrontation before my separation from that doomed family. I spoke with Nutter – briefly, without feeling – as we both sat on the platform of the local railway station weeks later, as summer gave way to the autumn of 1962. It was a month after the death of Marilyn Monroe – and with her passed my childhood. We were waiting for the same train to take us away – from our homes, from each other and from ourselves – to London. There was little left to say.
‘What did you do to Sue?’
‘Nothing.’
‘She’s been crying a lot.’
‘Oh. Where are you going?’
‘London. I’m sick of this place. I’m going to join a band.’
‘What about your girlfriend and the . . .’
‘None of your business.’
There was a pause. Then I asked ‘Where will you stay?’
‘Don’t try to find me.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
Another pause. ‘What about you?’
‘Oh, I have a place to go.’ This was true. Only the previous week I had received a letter from Mr Phillips containing £30, an address and a set of keys, asking me to join him as a guest in his new home in the capital. He had left the school – or been asked to leave, depending who you believe – and was ready to embark on a theatrical career. And he wanted me by his side.
The train rolled into the station as Nutter and I parted in silence. He walked down the platform to find a seat in a second-class smoker, lugging his guitar behind him. I stepped aboard first-class and watched my childhood slip quietly away down the tracks.
CHAPTER TWO
I left home with nothing but my stage experience, and arrived in a city poised on the brink of revolution. As yet, London hadn’t begun to swing; it needed only the catalyst that would set the sixties in motion and make it the centre of the world.
I had no academic qualifications, no ‘CV’, no means of earning money, but not for one moment did I think of turning back. Not even as I stood on the platform at Waterloo, surrounded by strangers, vainly searching for one last glimpse of Nutter. There was nothing for me at home, and ahead of me – everything.
Luckily, I wasn’t friendless in the big city, and pulled from my pocket a letter from Phyllis containing detailed directions to his house. Unsure of my way but trusting, I picked out a well-dressed gentleman and asked him the way to an address in SE1. He took me by the arm, led me to a cafe and bought me coffee, explaining my route and asking all about my new life and prospects. ‘If you should wander from the path, lad,’ he said, producing a card from his car coat, ‘feel free to give me a call.’ Londoners were friendlier than I had feared.
Conscious of the need to save money, and delighting in the warm late summer sunshine, I decided to make my way on foot. Leaving the shadow of the great glass-roofed terminus, I emerged on to Waterloo Road, a blur of double-decker buses, black cabs and sports cars, alive with the cries of the stallholders, who brought colour to dusty arches. And there before my eyes was the Old Vic Theatre, like a great temple from antiquity. Would I one day walk that stage with Olivier, Gielgud? I hurried past.
As I neared my new home, the colours and sights of Waterloo receded and I stepped back into the nineteenth century, where blackened Victorian houses stood crazily between huge, rubble-filled craters, the unhealed wounds of the War. Where once were church spires and pleasure gardens now towered huge cranes, slowly, painfully rebuilding a shattered community. Between rows of tiny shops I finally found my street, a narrow lane of ancient terraces in the heart of the Elephant and Castle.
Timid souls might have been dismayed by that dingy street and the strange, lost old folk who shuffled along the pavements. But not me. I took a deep breath of sooty air, marched up to the front door and rang. A net curtain dropped behind the grimy window, and within seconds Phyllis was hustling me indoors like a mother hen.
The flat – or ‘maisonette’ as I soon learned to call it – was smart and compact, if less de luxe than Phyllis’s previous accommodation. His furniture (fine old pieces, many valuable) was ingeniously arranged in the smaller space, the highly polished rosewood and mahogany glowing with a deeper lustre for its plainer setting. He gave me the grand tour: a small bedroom where the vast antique bedstead took up most of the floorspace; a living room that housed a leather suite and copious books, the walls crammed with Phyllis’s priceless collection of prints; the ‘galley’ kitchen (how well I would soon know that room!) and spartan bathroom; and finally, the small back yard that Phyllis promised would be ‘a little bower of bliss’ within a year. ‘Now,’ he said, hanging my coat and taking my small bag of belongings, ‘you must make yourself completely at home.’
The first thing that struck me was the bed dilemma: there was only one. Of course Phyllis didn’t expect me to sleep with him, but as yet I was unacquainted with the great tradi
tions of ‘bedsitland’. ‘I could do with a nap,’ I said, stretching and yawning – that would give me an immediate answer.
‘Oh, dear boy, why didn’t you say?’ said Phyllis. ‘I’ll make up your bed on the sofa at once. Unless of course you’d prefer . . .’ I understood immediately, and opted for the sofa (not forgetting that the offer of the bed remained open, if unspoken, should the need arise).
Phyllis tucked me into my sleeping bag and sat on the edge of the sofa, sharing a glass of whisky and massaging my tired feet. Just as I had slipped into a deep, peaceful sleep, I was jolted awake by a crash and an oath that seemed to come from inches above my head. Shaking myself into full consciousness, I realized that the noise (now mawkish song) came from the street. The disadvantages of the sleeping arrangements were about to become horribly clear to me. The window of my basement bedsit looked out on to a tiny area, separated by a few railings from the street where the night traffic of drunks and lost souls was even heavier than in the daytime. Within a few days, I had become accustomed to the local sounds – the sirens and pneumatic drills that formed an urban dawn chorus had little power to wake me. But there were nights when my nerves were bad, when I crept from my room to share the peace and warmth of Phyllis’s bed. There I slept largely undisturbed. But my main memory of those first months in London is one of constant fatigue.
Not only was I sleeping badly, I was working harder than ever before. My position in the household was not that of sponging parasite – I had to earn my keep, and was glad to do so. Cheerfully I undertook the domestic duties of which Phyllis, frail since the shock of his removal to London, was incapable. From the moment I rose I dusted, swept, washed, painted, brushed and polished, under the critical eye of my landlord. His standards in the domestic sphere were even more rigorous than in the dramatic, and soon the hitherto dingy maisonette was restored to its original splendour. It was work I loved (had fate dealt me a different hand I might have made a fortune from ‘doing up’ old property), but under my patron’s supervision it became arduous.
