At My Mother's Knee (43 page)

Tony had been plotting a way to depose this usurper, this
brazen cuckoo who had ousted us from the nest, and finally he
had a brainwave. It was not common knowledge outside music
circles that JP was gay, although he had a partner, Terry, whom
he usually referred to as his personal assistant. He was very
discreet and expected others to act the same when out with
him in public.

We decided to club together to pay for a large ad reading
'Stefan Loves JP' in the personal column at the back of
Gay
News
, in the hope that JP would see it and go crazy. Surely, we cackled evilly, such a blatant display of affection to an old
closet queen like JP would warrant nothing less than banishment
for the hated Stefan. Childish but very effective, the plan
worked brilliantly. It got rid of Stefan quicker than Swarfega
on grease. Tony was ecstatic and cracked open half a bottle of
'the widow' from his parents' cellar. 'To us!' He raised his
glass. 'That'll larn them.'

The last time I saw JP was a few weeks after my eighteenth
birthday. He'd asked Tony and me to join him at a small party
in
Portmeirion
, the village in West Wales used as the location
for the cult series
The Prisoner
. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon,
and the hot sun beating down on the Italianate village
made you believe that you were on the Amalfi coast. We had
lunch in the hotel dining room with the architect and creator
of the village,
Clough Williams Ellis
. He'd not long been
knighted and JP was making a big fuss of him. He was in his
eighties but full of life and great company, giving me a signed
copy of his book about the village which I've still got. After
lunch I retired with JP to his suite in a Hansel and Gretel
cottage in the grounds. He asked me to lie on the bed with him.
This is it, I thought, bracing myself, time to pay the piper – but
I was wrong. We lay there side by side, holding hands and
listening to the birds.

'I'm going to America soon,' JP said, breaking the silence, 'so
I don't know if we shall see each other again, for a long while
at least.' I was surprised and slightly horrified to see a tear
running down the side of his cheek and into his ear. He was in
a maudlin mood. 'When, hopefully a long time from now, you
hear of my death, think of me fondly.'

Years later, when I read his obituary in
The Times
as I sat
waiting for my first day of filming as Roxanne, the copper's
nark, in
The Bill
, I did remember him fondly and silently
thanked him for making the summer of '73 a memorable one.

*

Tony was part of a rummage crew. Along with other Customs
men he searched the cargo ships entering the port of Liverpool
for drugs. This gave him ample opportunity to check the crew
out, sniff out the ones who were desperate for a bit of male
company (and there were many!) and discreetly arrange a
liaison with them in a pub on the Dock Road called the
Dominion. It was a notorious prostitutes' pub, frequented by
sailors and the kind of queen you weren't supposed to
have anything to do with. I'd get a phone call when he had
a catch.

'Get your arse down the Dominion tonight, we're meeting a
few
Persian sailors
.'

'Who was that on the phone, Paul?'

'Only Tony.'

'Oh yes, what did he want?'

'Wants me to meet him and some of his friends from
work
for a drink tonight.'

'That's nice.'

If she'd known that the friends were a pack of extremely
randy Persian sailors she wouldn't have been so agreeable. The
Dominion was a pretty scary place; the word rough didn't
come into it. Tony, not in the least bit bothered, elbowed his
way past two hard-looking women and ordered the drinks
from the faded queen behind the bar. I lit a cigarette and stared
selfconsciously at my shoes in case I caught anyone's eye.
When Tony returned with the drinks I relaxed and looked
around. Penny and
Frances, the two queens
I'd seen in the
Lisbon, were sat with a gang of sailors having a rare old time.
Penny, drink and fag in hand, inclined his head towards me
regally, screwing his face up in a smile that was meant to translate
as 'look what I've got'.

'Who the fuck is that?' Tony asked, scanning the group of
sailors to see if he recognized any who might have been
poached by the arachnoid Penny and Frances.

'Oh, just some queen called Penny.' I was trying to look
casual as I slyly examined the rim of my glass to see if it was
clean. I was aware that it was a gesture my dad would've
made if he was in a strange pub and resented him for it. I
didn't want to feel like my dad standing in the
Dominion
,
I wanted to feel the exact opposite of everything he was. I
wanted to be bad.

The
sailors
Tony had arranged to meet turned out to be not
at all what I'd expected. Instead of the rowdy bunch of sexcrazed
pirates that I'd half hoped they'd be, I shook hands
politely with a group of shy but devastatingly handsome young
men. They could easily have risen straight from the pages of
Jean Genet, ruggedly masculine yet as beautiful as girls. Tony
was in his element. 'What would you chaps like to drink then?'
he asked the group at large. Their leader, a stunner called
Paul
who spoke the best English, was having none of it and insisted
that they buy the drinks. 'Nope,' said Tony, 'you're our guests
and I insist on buying you a drink.' Turning to me as he went
to the bar, 'We don't want them to think that we're a pair of
Liverpool scrubbers like your friends over there, do we?' he
said, winking at me slyly.

The Dominion started to get busy so we moved on, showing
them around the town, popping into the Bear's Paw for a
couple of drinks, the navy paying by now, keeping a possessive
eye on the sailors in case some lairy queen had designs on any
of them.

'You want to be careful, you do,' Brian the sardonic barman
said as he cleared our table of empty glasses. 'You'll get a bad
name hanging around sailors.'

We ended up back on the ship, which was easier said than
done as you had to get past the copper on the dock gate first.
Luckily, Tony was an old hand at this and knew where the
'whore's entrance' was – a hole in the fence that we could get
through without detection. It was exciting climbing up the gangplank and boarding the ship, that smell of oil and seawater
as heady a perfume to my nostrils as any rose. Below deck, an
orgy was in full swing. There was some sort of sexual activity
going on in every cabin. On the way down the corridor I saw
Penny stepping gingerly out of a cabin, so drunk he could
hardly stand. He stared at me quizzically, trying to figure out
where he knew me from. ''Scuse me,' he slurred, pointing at
me with his bottle of lager, 'what are you doing on board? This
isn't the
Royal
fuckin'
Iris
, you know. And don't let me catch
you giving it away,' he shouted after me as I brushed past, 'I'm
sick of you lousy free fucks.' We sat in Paul's cabin drinking
bottles of Oranjeboom, talking and flirting, and I felt totally at
home. The company was good, the booze and fags in plentiful
supply, the cabin cosy and compact and a young man with the
body of an Olympian god stretched out on the bunk in a vest
and shorts was smiling at me. I silently cursed my dad for not
letting me go to sea.

A woman with a small baby in one arm appeared at the door
of the cabin asking if anyone had a bottle opener. The boys
obviously knew her well as they made a great fuss of her and
the child, inviting her in and offering her a drink. She was one
of the many prostitutes who lived on the ships. They went
from ship to ship, living on board with one of the sailors until
it was time to sail, then moving on, hopefully finding lodging
aboard the next vessel that came into port. She introduced herself
to me and Tony as
Dot
, adding that she was known in the
locality as Dry Dock Dot. Considering that her transient life
must have been unbelievably hard and unpredictable, she was
a surprisingly optimistic soul.

'It's not a bad life,' she said, dipping the tip of her little
finger in the bottle of Oranjeboom and giving it to her baby
to suck. 'I get to see the world and I don't even have to go
anywhere.'

*

If all the nice girls love a sailor then so do some bad lads. I've
always had a soft spot for the navy ever since Popeye and then
John, my paramour from school, who left me for a life at sea.
There's something romantic about the notion of a sailor, a
seafaring nomad with a girl or boy in every port, leaving a trail
of broken hearts from Rangoon to Southampton. There was
no commitment with a sailor: it was here today, gone tomorrow,
with a good time had by all guaranteed, which at the
time suited me just fine. I enjoyed playing the wisecracking
slut. I was even getting over the embarrassment I suffered
when leaving a ship in the morning and having to walk the
length of the dock to a chorus of catcalls and wolf whistles
from the dockers. Fuck 'em. Instead of running, head down,
for the hole in the fence I was sashaying, head and two fingers
up, out of the front gate.

Partying on the ships was a complete contrast to working in
the dour atmosphere of the Magistrates Court. I'd been elevated
from the court collecting office to the courts themselves and I
was now a
trainee clerk of the court
, sat reverently underneath
the magistrates, next to the clerk who handed over forms for
costs, probationary reports and any other reverently information
required by the beaks. I was in Number Three Court and it was
here that the cases of prostitutes, drunks and vagrants were
tried. It was one of the busiest and smelliest courts to work in
and after a three-hour session on a hot day you needed a gas
mask. It was entertaining at first, but after a while I realized I was
listening to the same old excuses from the same faces who
appeared week after week in the dock. I got to talk to some of
them while I was having a quick fag in the main hall. One
woman was never out of court: a shoplifter and parttime prostitute
and not a very successful one judging by the times she
was up before the beak. We'll call her
Marlene Corby
.

'I was standing at the bus stop with me mate, eating a bag of
chips, when this bloke approached and asked me if I wanted business. I was actually thinking of goin' home but I thought
fuck it, and said to me mate, "Hold me chips while I give this
one a quick seeing-to, and keep your eye peeled for that bus."
How was I to know he was a friggin' copper?'

Marlene was the prototype for Lily Savage's criminal side.
One morning I was telling her about my mother, who'd been
having strange pains in her chest and I was worried about her.

'I'll light a candle for her, lad,' she said piously, patting my
hand.

Marlene managed to stay out of the courts for a few weeks
until she was nicked one night for soliciting while drunk and
disorderly. She was not a pretty sight standing bleary-eyed in
the dock the next morning.

'Marlene Corby, you are charged with—'

Marlene interrupted the clerk as she suddenly recognized me.
'Oh, hello, love,' she trilled, giving me a wave. 'How's your
mother's chest?'

The magistrates above me spluttered with indignation. One
of them leaned forward and tapped me on the head with his
pencil. 'How do you know this common prostitute?' he asked.

'Common? Common?' Marlene squealed with self-righteous
ire. 'I may be a prostitute but I am certainly not common,' she
said, puffing out her chest like an angry quail and letting out a
loud belch.

'Take this woman back to the cells until she fully sobers up,'
the magistrate said, and, turning to me, added portentously,
'You are dismissed from court.'

I was hauled over the coals for that one. I couldn't see the
harm in it, talking to people while they were waiting to go into
court – it wasn't as if they were murderers or child molesters –
but no, it was them and us and never the twain shall meet and
Leslie Pugh
, the stipendiary magistrate, warned that I'd be out
on my ear if it happened again.

'This is a court of law, O'Grady, not a Tupperware party,' I remember him saying, although the chances of finding Marlene
at a Tupperware party are open to debate.

A professor from Liverpool University who drank in the Bear's
Paw and with whom I'd become friendly compared Liverpool's
'vibrant underground
gay scene
' (as he called it) and the subculture
that existed in the docks of the city to the Shanghai of
the twenties. 'If Shanghai was the whore of the Orient,' he
said, 'then Liverpool is the Very Naughty Aunty of the North
West.' I was spending so much time in the Bear's Paw that
Gordon, the manager, said I might as well come and work
behind the bar.

I felt I'd hit the jackpot. I was able to go out clubbin' and get
paid for it at the same time, with the added advantage of being
able to chat up the customers across the bar that I'd previously
been too shy to approach. One night I was asked if I'd like to
go for a meal on a Chinese ship after work. I'd liked what little
Chinese food I'd tasted in the past and so I went.

'Watch out they don't slip you a Mickey Finn and pack you
off in a crate to South East Asia,'
Brian the barman
warned.

I had a great time. We gathered in the large galley and the
crew crouched down along the walls to eat, shovelling noodles
into their mouths at an alarming speed. The food was
delicious; to this day I've never tasted Chinese food to equal
that meal. I drank a gallon of Singha Beer and, untouched by
human hand, Chinese or otherwise, went home in a taxi and
not in a crate as predicted by Brian.

He had a lot to say the next night at work, shuffling around
behind the bar in the manner of a cod geisha girl, fanning his
face with a beer mat and singing 'The Ying Tong Song'.