II
A Short Family Mythology
Great-Uncle Tommy, who worked with my grandfather in India, had a secretary called Merle Oberon. When she later became a film star she never failed to invite him to her premieres, until one day he unwittingly mentioned their shared past.
At seventeen my mother, Elizabeth, went to the Viceroy’s ball. The Vicereine of India had an obsession with imperial purple. The tablecloths and every detail down to the purple sweet-wrappers reflected this megalomaniac vision.
In the early twenties there was a slump in rubber consumption which followed the boom in the Great War; the slump devastated the plantations in Malaya. George V announced an Imperial Rubber Drive and my great-Aunt Doris, who made a bouquet of pink rubber roses scented with the most expensive perfume from Paris, became the symbol of the campaign when she presented them to Queen Mary.
Then Mimosa, my grandmother, and Doris fell out over the following affair: one Christmas Eve Doris decided to go to dinner at the Dorchester with her two teenage sons Harreton and Ian. The Dorchester told her that at such short notice a table was impossible. Maybe she’d like to come next year. Doris, who was a determined lady, was undeterred. She told Harreton to ring up saying he was the secretary of the Maharanee of Jaipur and HRH would like a table for three. A table was immediately organised and Doris, donning a sari, arrived with both her sons blacked up. My grandfather was scandalised when he read this in the gossip columns, and a family rift was born.
Later, when the first Sputnik was launched, Doris was in the papers again. Now in her eighties, she congratulated the Russians and presented herself at the Embassy as a possible first woman in space. She was quoted as saying that she’d had a good life and at her age she wasn’t too worried if they didn’t resolve the problem of re-entry. As a footnote the article said she was the first woman who played polo in India, side-saddle.
Both my mother and my father, Lance, had an artistic bent. Dad’s father, Hedley, was the first violin and a founder member of the first symphony orchestra in Christchurch, New Zealand. Father played the piano and sculpted beautiful Deco candlesticks for Syrie Maugham in Duralamum. My father often flew up to Syrie’s house for weekends. When, at the opening of Jubilee, he met Jordan, he said, ‘You young things might think you’re daring, but I remember Vivienne Leigh wearing a leopard-skin bikini at Syrie’s before the war.’
My mother went to Harrow Art School against her parents’ wishes and afterwards Norman Hartnell employed her with four other girls as a personal assistant. She helped get the clothes ready for the royal tour of Paris and would talk to the customers while they waited – the most important job being to keep Bebe Daniels from meeting Jessie Matthews as they’d swapped husbands or something of that ilk. She left this job as an excellent designer of clothes, and went on to make all her own clothes from the Vogue patterns for the rest of her life.
My parents met at a dance at Northholt airfield and were married at Holy Trinity, Northwood, on 31 March 1940. Their marriage photo, taken under a daffodil bell hanging from the lychgate, was published in nearly every national newspaper. They were a most glamorous couple. My father in his RAF uniform, my mother, her veil caught by the wind, holding some lily of the valley. The photo is full of joy and spring sunlight – a photo of hope at this dark moment. Many years later my mother said, looking at it, ‘It’s a pity neither you nor your sister inherited our good looks.’
~
Other People’s Mythologies
When he was six Anthony Harwood decided to test a theory that he had heard at school. Seizing the family’s white Persian cat, Alex, he climbed gingerly to the top of the house and threw him out of the highest attic window. Then he rushed downstairs to retrieve the shaken and angry tom. Before it could escape his clutches Anthony had whisked it away, breathless with excitement and fear that he might be caught; he hurled himself back upstairs before hurling Alex through the window a second time. This time he crept downstairs feeling slightly guilty, but he needn’t have as Alex was sitting on the lawn, still alive and kicking and very angry. Employing all the arts of cat-seduction, Anthony managed to grab him again and up and away they went and Alex flew through the window a third time. On the way down again Anthony collided with his mother on the stairs who asked him what on earth he was doing. ‘An experiment,’ was the reply – ‘I’m testing Alex for his nine lives.’
~
The Wizard of Oz
Rome 1947: a matinée for Forces’ children. I think my parents had difficulty in getting me out of the flat since I’d never been to the movies before, and the lettuce for my tortoise’s lunch seemed more important. I can’t remember anything about the cinema itself but the film that I was about to see was to fill my childhood with dreams and nightmares, with witches and wizards and the emerald city itself. The lights were dimmed and we were transported to Kansas. It started happily enough with Dorothy singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. She was magical and I wished the other kids in the cinema – my schoolfriends – could have sung like her. But then it began to go wrong. A terrible storm blew up. I hung on to my seat, desperately, as the menacing dust devil bore down on us. No one else in the cinema seemed to be taking the danger seriously, and then, pure horror, we were blown into the sky. I ducked under my seat with a terrified wail to emerge wide-eyed a few moments later in Munchkin land with my mother trying to stem the floods of tears. The Munchkins calmed me down and all went well till Dorothy, Tinman, Lion and Scarecrow were set upon by the wicked witch and her creepy-crawly minions. This time I bolted and was captured by the usherette and handed back along the row to my embarrassed parents. I took part in the rest of The Wizard of Oz, rather than merely watched it, and am grateful to this day that it had a happy ending.
Since that day I have always loved the film, a love tinged with a little apprehension of the power of movies to move. If it plays anywhere I take my friends to see it. There is nothing in it that isn’t perfect, the ideal escape film, where ‘Over the Rainbow’ is drenched in gorgeous Technicolor unlike our black and white reality. Tinman, Scarecrow and Lion have a simple, delicious human ‘frailty’ – how nice to have a scared lion, a scatter-brained scarecrow and a tin soldier constantly beset by rust as three avuncular heroes. And how wonderful it would be if we could all sing like Dorothy as I wished so long ago; and our problems could be righted by a wizard who frankly admits his incompetence.
In my work I have often thought of Oz. When I worked with Russell on The Devils the glistening white floor I’d designed for the huge index library went all blotchy in the damp English weather and caused a Monday-morning crisis. Oh for the emerald floor at Oz, that shone with a Hollywood lustre. Then later, when I was filming The Tempest, Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban danced along the Bamburgh sands and I realised I’d directed them as if they too were on the road to the wicked witch’s castle.
And the wicked old witch herself, well, I often thought of her secretly, and after my initial fright grew to love her. One day I told my Oz story to Frank Dunlop, the theatre director, who said he could easily arrange for me to see her. As it was Christmas she would be entertaining children in one of the big New York department stores. I never took up the offer, too worried a cherished childhood memory might evaporate. Then one morning I caught the Second Avenue bus – the bus was crowded and I was strap-hanging. The bus stopped and a little old lady climbed on next to me. I was vaguely aware that all eyes in the bus were trained in our direction. I looked without looking, and my God I was standing next to the witch! I thought maybe I’d speak to her about Rome and then thought better of breaking into her privacy. So stop after stop we travelled together with my heart thumping so loudly I was certain she must have heard it; until finally she got off and disappeared into the crowds.
~
Mimosa
Grandmother Mimosa lived on the fourth floor of a flat block in Northwood, which, as we constantly moved from Nissen hut to Nissen hut, seemed the permanent home of my childhood. The hours were chimed in by the Greek Temple clock in the dark hall. Pale grey walls and peach mirrors, lace antimacassars on the sofas. Mahogany furniture that had been bought at Maples, shipped to India and back again. The table set for lunch, with a peach satin tablecloth and cut-glass salt and pepper pots like pineapples.
I play with my chemistry set in the bathroom, constructing crystal gardens, or handle the delicate ivory Mah Jong set. At night I dream I’m holding on to the balcony for dear life, the flat tilting at a crazy angle while down below the Metroland trains thunder past.
In the morning, Mrs Peachy dusts the ornaments and methodically breaks them. Granny scolds her and glues them together with sticky brown secotine. ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ – the dread monkeys glower at you. In Mimosa’s bedroom there are amber beads, which pick up tissue paper when you rub them, scattered over her dressing-room table; over which a blue bird flies.
She arrives in triumph: ‘This, Derek, is a banana. We haven’t seen them since before the war.’
Mrs Peachy dusts the radio, which often plays Grandma’s favourite songs from Oklahoma! On top of it are silver-framed photos of Harry Lytton, her late husband with the sweet smile. There are others, of my mother. They have mimosa pressed behind the glass. Mimosa, Grandma’s flower. So evanescent, like a morning mist it dissolves in the sunlight – smell of the Côte d’Azur before the war. Before the war. You won’t remember.
My grandmother Mimosa
Mother and myself, Northwood, 1945
~
Poltergeists
Christmas, 1951. Northwood: Aunt Moyra, my mother’s younger sister, newly married to her doctor-husband, moved into a small house round the corner from my grandmother, Mimosa. Here she invited the whole family for Christmas dinner. The large turkey required for this event wouldn’t fit into her small oven, so an elaborate plan was hatched. My mother cooked the turkey in Grandmother’s larger oven; and when Moyra telephoned, the turkey, placed on Grandmother’s huge willow charger, was driven over by my father and put into the oven so that its legs stuck out. Meanwhile, preparations for the feast were finalised. I stood by watching while my mother and aunt removed the great bird from the oven, heaving it on to the small collapsible table. They missed the centre of balance and the table tilted under the weight and the turkey, on Gran’s beloved charger, came rumbling towards me as I stood at the end. ‘Catch!’ shouted Mother and Aunt Moyra, waving their hands in the air hysterically. I stood with my arms outstretched and my eyes closed as the huge fowl sped towards me in horrid slow motion. When we collided it knocked me flat. The willow charger hit the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces while the turkey burst at both ends under the impact, sending a salvo of stuffing across the room. The meal never recovered. My father shouted at me, Gran lost her temper, came to my rescue and nagged her two daughters for the loss of a plate that had survived Hitler’s bombs.
After the dinner a television set, the first I’d ever seen, was switched on and a greyish, crackly image misted its tiny screen.
~
Christmas 1952: At the end of the Christmas lunch we are waiting for the Queen’s speech from Australia. There is great excitement because it is being broadcast live, an immense technical feat of radio. My father, a New Zealander, listens intently as messages are relayed from Auckland and Sydney. There are vivid, on-the-spot descriptions from all over the Commonwealth that cackle on and off. Then, silence. The silence is long, and my father remarks on the distance: ‘They’ll get it right for the speech.’ He gets up to fiddle with the knobs on Granny Mimosa’s mammoth walnut wireless. And then we notice – the set’s on fire! Smoke is pouring out of it. My mother gives a startled cry: ‘A hot-water bottle; don’t touch it, Lance.’ But my father seizes it with both hands, staggering under the weight, and shoulders it over the edge of the balcony into the yard where it smashes far below. My mother stands holding a hot-water bottle in the middle of the room. ‘I thought it might be live,’ she says.
~
August 1953. Somerset
When my father was posted to RAF Merryfield in Somerset we moved into the most beautiful house of my childhood. The ancient, stone-built manor of Curry Mallet, rented from owners who lived in Australia, was one of the oldest in Somerset. It was built around a central courtyard with high, ornate Tudor chimney stacks. There was a great medieval A-frame hall – panelled rooms with vast fireplaces and a circular stone staircase. The huge garden, divided by tall yew hedges, was bordered by a high stone wall and the remains of a moat, now the village duck pond. In the middle of the lawn stood an ancient yew which, the villagers maintained, was recorded in Domesday.
The house was haunted. The ghost, a young girl, appeared frequently. The lady who lived there before us had stayed only three days. One evening, as she was gazing into a dressing-mirror, the wraith appeared over her shoulder and joined in the gaze while she sat frozen on the stool. Apparently in the 1680s a daughter of the Mallet family – who had come over with the Conqueror and established this as the first manor on the site – fell in love with a lad from Cathanger, who had joined the Monmouth rebellion against James II. He fell victim to Judge Jeffreys’ assize at Taunton; and ever since she had stalked through the house, heartbroken.
None of the villagers would come near to the manor after dark, except old Mrs Pilkington who lived next door, who would sometimes babysit for my parents. Deaf, and in her eighties, she had never gone further afield than Taunton, eleven miles down the road, and that infrequently. She would insist we stay up with her in the living-room with the wireless up to full volume until they returned, listening to spine-chilling episodes of ‘Dick Barton’.
In the summer my father left for Pakistan, leaving my mother to pack up the house alone. In the evenings she went to bed early. After several days she noticed that after Big Ben had chimed in the nine o’clock news, a door would swing open and then close with a crash. So every evening she would walk through the old house closing the great oak doors, and each evening at nine, though there was not the slightest breath of wind, she would hear the heavy iron latches open and the doors swing, as the ghost walked.
~
My father takes his picture, 1930s
Karachi, my parents at a reception, 1954
The Himalayas
On Boxing Day 1953, my mother, my sister and I caught the boat train to Liverpool and boarded one of the last liners to do the run to India, the SS Circassia. The voyage was uneventful until we reached Port Said; except for a terrible gale in the Bay of Biscay, during which we were all battened down, and the dining-rooms were empty with everyone suffering from sea sickness. Our arrival at Port Said, however, changed all this. Suddenly the ship was a-bustle. As we steamed past the statue of De Lesseps on the quay, conjuring guly-guly men appeared as if out of thin air – produced live chicks out of eggs, tore pound notes in half, threw them overboard, and miraculously restored them. Then we prepared to go ashore and visit the department store – Simon Artz – which sold all manner of things, tooled with hieroglyphs. There were Eighteenth Dynasty handbags, wallets from the Old Kingdom, Fifth Dynasty cigarette cases for the Egyptian cigarettes in their gilded and bemedalled packaging. Also, gaudy silken carpets with camels and pyramids and of course scarlet fezes with black tassels.
We passed through the customs and were given a body-search by some zealous young Egyptian guards. Everybody grumbled but went along with it until two English dowagers, who had been doing the trip to India since the death of Queen Victoria, put a stop to it. ‘What do you think you are doing? This is an outrage. Where is your commanding officer?’ They barked like drill sergeants, their petticoats rustling like machine-gun fire. The young soldiers blanched and fell back under this onslaught. There was obviously no quarter going to be given, and blood was about to be spilt. ‘Out of my way. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Come along Doris, we’re not having any of this. It’s perfectly disgusting.’ And the two of them, styled like the Himalayas, pushed their way past.
As we sailed through the Suez Canal the gang of kids who’d formed themselves into a lethal pack during the long voyage fell to debating whether the Red Sea would be red or not. We sailed out of the canal into a beautiful rosy sunset mirrored in the calmest sea I have ever seen. The Red Sea was indeed red, and all sorts of wagers were unexpectedly won and lost. I had pillaged the Christmas tree for silver balls when it was taken down. I tied one on a piece of cotton and gently lowered it over the side of the liner where it bounced along in the wake. A tiny, glittering spark in the sunset.
~
231B Somerset Street, Karachi
Pakistan, 1954: swarms of locusts drifted like grey veils across the evening sky. In the wasteland at the end of the garden the wild dogs barked. My mother ‘turned a blind eye’ as the cook – the most irascible of our battalion of servants – grilled the toast on a prong, his feet propped up on the charcoal range, using his toes as a toast rack. Later, he fell asleep in the warm afternoon with his feet in the huge old refrigerator which chugged and hummed away while the punkahs turned listlessly above.
~
Subcontinental Suburbia
The last stragglers of the Raj were cut off in their enclaves with their endless social round, the cocktail faces sweating it out over the gin and tonics; life ordered by a routine of exquisite boredom within well-defined parameters. As a child of eleven one’s curiosity neatly offset any sense of alienation. Small things preoccupied me: butterflies, my fish tank. I hardly noticed the anomalous situation around me. Here you woke up in the morning to find your clothes neatly folded, the toothpaste already on the toothbrush, and breakfast laid.
You had ‘to behave’ under the watchful eye of Yacoub or Nikka Khan, with their white and gold uniforms, hold your nose and swallow the glass of salty water which my mother ordered to begin the day. The salt pills she had discovered were so strong they made me sick. Then the tutor arrived and attempted to teach me maths, a kindly soul who had adopted local dress – it always looked slightly soiled and somehow out of place in the blank, rather antiseptic rooms.
The afternoons were spent swimming, or in one of the old fishing-boats; the evenings, with luck, were spent on the beach at Bilagi, where the turtles lumbered out of the phosphorescent surf to lay improbable numbers of ping-pong eggs in the sand. Their young, tiny perfect replicas, dodged the ghostly spider crabs which ambushed them, sideways along the dunes.
The flimsy copy of The Times arrived to announce new riots in Karachi – which we, living there, never saw. Instead, there were military parades with kilts, bagpipes and camels; and once, Pandit Nehru a few feet away taking the salute.
One afternoon I threw a tantrum after a tea-party of obnoxious, precocious eleven-year-olds, on the lawns of the Beach luxury hotel – given by the sons of the prime minister and the grandsons of Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. A bearer stood behind every second spoilt child. I refused to attend any more of these social events.
Once Yacoub went north and brought back a stuffed peacock which an army of ants then removed, with military precision, to the last feather, from the table beside my bed deep in the night.
~
Gone with the Wind
The woods around the hillside station near Muree (Pakistan) were a riot of wild flowers – the azaleas and rhododendrons were over, but in the sunlit clearings the garden flowers of England bloomed in their wild state.
Back home, at school in Hampshire, the rose pergola through which we walked in a crocodile to Chapel bisected an old walled garden – scattered with gnarled fruit trees. On either side, deep wine-coloured peonies bowed, heavy with raindrops, and scattered their petals like the crinolines in Gone with the Wind (Mimosa had forbidden my mother to call me Ashley). Lupins bloomed, blue and magenta. There was one which, when I was eleven, produced as many flower spikes. There were shirley poppies, jet-black and silky scarlet, which I helped burst out of their hairy green casings – when no one was looking – unravelling their petals like butterflies emerging into the sunlight from their chrysalis. The roses on the pergola were pink and heavy; their petals fell like confetti along the gravel path. On Sundays the crocodile wound under them twice and we sang ‘Abide with Me/Fast Falls the Eventide’ to the rickety harmonium, and then walked back in twos and threes, the formality broken. The scent from the lime trees mixed with the sharp smell of the creamy privet flowers, as we stopped and searched for the caterpillars of the privet hawk, which no one ever found. Along one of the hedgerows which bordered the grounds were violets. I kept their whereabouts to myself, and used to press them between the pages of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.
Along the paths that bisected the scrub – clinging to the sandy cliffs which tumbled on to the shingle of the Milford beach – there were oak eggers and puss moths, and the drinkers that sent secret signals to each other. At night, I crept into the bathroom, turned on the light and opened the window to capture the emerald and downy white ermine moths for my collection. And once a year we were driven to the New Forest for a picnic – after lunch I hunted among the beech trees for white admirals, but never caught sight of the elusive emperor, whose capture would have made me a king. In the cornfield we hollowed out a nest, and ate the green ears, pretending to be field mice; and sharpened lethal pea-shooters from the stalks of wild cow parsley, using the verdigris ivy berries as ammunition. Up above, in the trees which were bent and stunted by the wind sweeping up the Solent, we created a secret walkway to cross the school grounds in the air from where high above the ground you could see the foam-flecked waves dashing themselves against the Needles.
~
Swans
My first ‘conscious’ painting was copied from the top of a biscuit tin, a watercolour of swans flying in the sunset by Peter Scott. Up until that time I was unaware that painting and writing were set apart as disciplines. In the art class more copies were undertaken, but in a hidden recess I kept my own first sketch-pad, a lined HMSO notebook in which I carefully copied dinosaurs, fought airy battles over Tudor townscapes, and made meticulous watercolours of flowers.
~
Hordle House, Milford, 1951
At nine I discovered that sleeping with someone was more fun than sleeping alone and climbed into my mate Gavin’s bed. Cuddling each other alleviated some of the isolation of boarding school. This wholly innocent affair was destroyed by a jealous dormitory captain who crept out one morning and informed the headmaster’s wife. She descended on us like a harpy and, in her fury, pulled the mattress right off the bed, turning us on to the floor. The headmaster whipped us both, and afterwards commended the sneak and threatened to tell our parents of this horrible crime; before calling us out of the class and denouncing us in front of the other boys with, ‘This sort of behaviour will make you blind,’ and the like.
From then sexual encounters at school became furtive and unsuccessful, in the lavatories and bushes, fearful they might be discovered. Masturbation and exhibitionism, which only involved yourself, and was therefore somehow less reprehensible, became the way. To have an orgasm with ejaculation was the dream of every boy in the dormitory, as it meant you were on the way to growing up; and when this happened the whole gang would cluster around the bed of the lucky individual to have a look.
~
Nascent Sexuality
Growing up on RAF stations and at boarding school in the 1950s, one was extremely isolated. By sixteen I was fully aware of my sexual orientation but imagined, and probably even hoped, that I’d grow out of it. I became increasingly reclusive – something all my friends noticed. I went to parties with dread and made every excuse to stay at home, where I painted in our neighbours’ attic or spent my time gardening, staring at the plants for hours at a time. I developed an aversion to physical contact and found sports and changing-rooms a nightmare. The destruction first wrought at Hordle, my prep school, grew like a poison vine.
Since then I have talked to scores of young men about their own first sexual experiences and have made love to many of them. One fact emerges quite clearly. Boys who’ve had the good fortune, at fourteen or fifteen or even earlier, to meet older men are nearly always more at ease with themselves sexually and are much better lovers. The old Greek way of men and women initiating adolescents of their own sex, helping them to discover their own sexuality in an atmosphere of responsibility, contained much humane and practical wisdom. I’m unconvinced that any boy’s ‘natural’ inclinations are ever altered by contacts of this kind – the only damage that can be inflicted is the threat of exposure by a ‘morality’ which outlaws innocent and uncomplicated desires, uproots affections at least as valuable as family ties, and affronts the basic freedoms of everyone. The bigotry of centuries has left a mass of dead wood, which honest people should now hack away and burn.
~
Painting It Out – Canford School, 1956
At fourteen I paint in self-defence. The school is bleak and soulless, dominated by bells, prayers, bullying, and everything that brings a chill; a huge shadow cast over life, distilled into a distressing muscular Christianity. We dress in grey suits with stiff starched collars which cut into your neck; we polish our black shoes, and polish them again and parade past the prefects twice a day. On Wednesdays we change into prickly khaki uniforms and march up and down and on the spot. A subtle terror rules, thoughtfully preparing us for the outside world. I feel threatened, isolated, and friendless – I’m hopeless at all the communal activities, particularly ball games. And so I take refuge in the art house, where there is an old coke stove, broken and comfortable furniture, books and drawers full of postcards. Every free moment is spent there.
Here there is blossom by Van Gogh, empty wine bottles for cubist still lives and mirrors to stare at yourself. These are my weapons against the other order.
Once in a while we escape into the outside world in ‘Percy’, my art master’s drop-head Rolls-Royce circa 1928, made of aluminium riveted by brass; although it’s seen better days you can still do seventy down the Dorset lanes with your hand on the klaxon to warn the world you’re coming. ‘Percy’ is perfect for scavenging old doors and other treasures from the demolition sites around Poole. Once he takes us north, to Stanley Spencer’s Burghclere Chapel. The paintings image the sacrifice of an entire generation. At sixteen I am convinced that together they form the greatest masterpiece in the history of painting.
My art master, Robin Noscoe, ran his art school with a delightful absent-minded shrewdness. It was from Robin that I learned that an artist was practical, whatever his outward eccentricity. Robin was mentor rather than teacher, he ignored the gulf that separated master and pupil and embraced you as a collaborator and equal. His interest in his own painting was minimal; in fact he’d probably have agreed that you were as good a painter as himself, if you had dared suggest so. This situation would have been impossible in a history or maths class where the individual is of no consequence. Robin’s prime concern wasn’t painting – he was an excellent silversmith who stamped his spoons and rose bowls with his own hallmark. He built his own house with help from the boys, who learned bricklaying and carpentry, while Phyl, his wife, brewed cups of tea. The house was up to date, but its design incorporated medieval doors, old mirrors, cobbles from the beach, and fine antique floors from a demolished country house. Later he incorporated a door which I had carved and painted with quotations from Chaucer. He also built his own furniture, constructing a fine dining-table from an acacia tree that was brought down in a storm. In the art school he was a potter and every two weeks or so the great brick kiln we had built would be fired with wood scavenged from the grounds, and the pottery with its fine ash glazes would be scattered through the building and used as brush pots and crockery. As the kiln was unpacked Robin would stand by, stroking his grey goatee beard, his face wreathed in a delightful boyish enthusiasm. For a fourteen-year-old it was remarkable to see a grown-up so openly enthusiastic and in love with his work. For the boys he taught, Robin was an inspiration. Art was never mentioned in any academic context, but was a part of living in which anyone, whatever their natural ability or talent, could share.
~
The bell chimes like a raw tooth, the spell is broken. I walk back unwillingly to Montacute House, with its echoes of John of Gaunt, feudal power and the ideals of chivalry – antecedent to the vicious fraudulent gentility that in this school masks a system of bullying and repression, coupled with a deliberate philistine aggression towards learning and intelligence, which are only acceptable if saturated with the muddied values of the rugger pitch. Canford epitomises an English education and distils in miniature the most (truly) distressing aspects of the society that maintains and underlies it. The aggression carries over into many aspects of the teaching, which serves not to enlighten but to repress. A systematic destruction of the creative mind, called ‘education’, is under way. This has one aim: to awe you into impotence under the guise of teaching you judgement. Painting escapes, as for a word-bound culture the image is not so important, but the word used creatively could endanger the system. Thus expression, not just political expression, is frowned upon. At Kings my tutor, Eric Mottram, asked, ‘Why are you here? The only place where you can receive a genuine education in England is the Royal College of Art.’
~
I was always academically backward; I learned to read late, could just add and subtract – and no more. I failed exams with dismal regularity, a backward boy who when given an IQ test on my arrival at Canford came out with ninety-five subnormal. However, what I lacked in the disciplines I made up with a sharp eye. In the Senior Common Room at Montacute there was an oak cupboard, under which prayers were said both morning and night, which held the silver cups the House had won. Mr Shorland Ball, our housemaster, was up jogging before dawn, his pipe thrust into his face with its fixed smile, encouraging the lads – without success. The cupboard remained bare, except for the huge silver pot for art. It was a constant reproach, and for winning it I, with a small gang of friends, was treated mercilessly and bullied constantly, while at each year’s ‘promotion’ that might have cut down the amount of fagging and given me a few hours’ more freedom, I was passed by. I reacted predictably – I deliberately missed my tackles on the rugger pitch, was bowled out for nought, and crossed the line last. Even now, as I write this, images of a flame-thrower and cans of petrol cross my mind and I see Barry’s ugly barren building wreathed in purifying flames.
~
At seventeen my reports said ‘Fair’ and ‘Average’ and ‘Could do better’, when Andrew Davis, an English master who was conspicuous amongst the staff for his stand for the ‘mind’ – he collected antiquarian books and first editions, was a Rhodes scholar, and had an easy ironic humour – took me into a private class that he held in his study for the brightest sixth-form pupils. He was interested in painting, my ‘daubs’ as he called them, and sensed the difficulties I was having. I joined the class nervously. It was May, and outside Andrew’s window a chestnut tree bloomed with deep-red flowers shimmering in a sea of green. Andrew caught me daydreaming, laughed, and set an essay on Antony and Cleopatra. I came back the following week with a short essay on Cleopatra as Isis and received glowing As. Perhaps Andrew deliberately rigged this, but the effect was electric. Here I was, a fifth-former with six of the brightest boys in the school, receiving the best results for an essay. The same week my housemaster had told me that to try for university would bring disappointment; he mentioned the dreaded IQ test with its near-moron results. Quietly I decided to beat them at their own game. What had been done once could be repeated.
That summer holiday my father told me I could leave the school if I wished. I realised that this was a considerable concession on his part as he took immense pride in the fact that he was seeing me through a public school. But his attitude was strangely mixed; as a New Zealander who had worked his passage to England he could at times scarcely conceal his dislike for a system in which he was an outsider, and his correspondence with my housemaster was to say the least edgy. But I had already made my decision in the English class, and declared I would soldier on. The question of university came up. He was determined I should go, and we made a pact. If I got a university place and also got into the Slade where I dreamed of going, I would go to the university and in return he promised he would see me through art school afterwards; a promise he meticulously fulfilled, even though I knew he would have preferred otherwise.
At eighteen I climbed the stairs to Mr Shorland Ball’s study, still not a prefect, as the system of preference had rigorously passed me by, clutching a piece of paper. Down below the art pot glowed in the cupboard. ‘I know what you’ve come to tell me,’ he said. ‘You’ve failed to get into Kings like the others.’ I smiled and said, ‘No, they’ve accepted me.’
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Bearings – London University
In 1960 I left school and came to London where I read a general degree in English history and art at Kings College in the Strand. For the first two years I commuted daily from my parents’ home in Northwood, a tight middle-class suburb where my father built a house after leaving the RAF. By the time I had made the two-way journey, ploughed through my reading schedule and done some painting, there wasn’t much room for a social life.
At Kings I was not much nearer solving my problems. There was no gay society in those days, and I had no idea of the existence or whereabouts of pubs or clubs – even had I known, I was much too shy or inhibited to make a first move. So at Kings I bought any books that had a gay subject-matter: Cocteau and Genet; and through my tutor, Eric Mottram, I discovered the existence of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.
My life at Kings was uneventful. I ploughed through the work schedule diligently, and came away with a 2.1 at the end of three years. The college remained firmly in the ‘background’. Out of the gates in the Strand you had London with its theatres and exhibitions; the university could hardly be said to exist and the parochial hothouse atmosphere of Oxbridge was absent. Every now and then I would spend a morning at the Slade, life drawing. I painted scenery for Miller’s The Crucible and designed the covers for the college magazine, Lucifer. Apart from that I belonged to none of the college societies, and kept myself very much to myself.
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Bearings – Europe, Summer 1962
Colmar: My lift stopped at Colmar for twenty minutes. In the main square a postcard of the Isenheim altar piece caught my eye. I stopped and discovered that it was in the museum – only twenty minutes. So I ran. I couldn’t stop off because my lift was going to take me, via Lâon, all the way to the coast. In five minutes I was at the museum door. Breathless, I asked where the altar piece was. Then I ran through the gallery past startled visitors, reaching the hall with four minutes to view the picture. The others looked at me curiously, probably thinking I was on a five-countries-in-five-days marathon. There are some paintings which diminish when you finally see them after years of reproductions in art books. They shrink away, pale ghosts of your imaginings, and others are overwhelming. When I hurled myself into the hall where the great panels were mounted, I was thrown into a terrible state of agitation. Breathless from the run I was surprised by the scale of the work – unlike many jewel-like paintings of the North, it was enormous. The colours blazed forth in great flaming haloes with shimmering rainbow edges, and the participants in the drama were transfigured by an assurance of their place in the late-medieval world.
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August 1962, Amfissa: Last night we hitched to Delphi on the back of a truck. We were dropped off several miles down the mountain road and began walking through the darkness. Before reaching the village we heard a stream, which flowed from the rocks at the roadside. We were all very tired, so we stopped and set up camp, resolving to carry on in the morning. At about 5 a.m. the sky began to brighten up, and we got up. After several weeks on the road, we are used to getting up with the sun. The nights were cold and rather uncomfortable, we hadn’t any proper camping equipment, so there’s no reason to stay abed if you’re sleeping on bare ground with a rucksack as a pillow.
We found ourselves in a grove of fig trees, in a cleft in the rocks with cliffs towering above. High above, eagles were circling in the updraught over Mount Parnassos, glinting in the sunlight that caught on their wings. Below us, the valley was a sea of smoky-grey olive trees. We built a fire and cooked breakfast on a large flat rock, and afterwards washed ourselves and our clothes in the icy water, hanging them up to dry on the fig trees. At 6.30 a couple arrived, looked at us strangely and retreated. Then Peter and I cleared up the breakfast and sat on the rock in the sunlight, while David, with his usual bravado, ignored some barbed wire and started to climb the rockface for a better view. He’d climbed about a hundred feet when our idyll was destroyed. Two police vans tore round the corner and screeched to a halt. All hell broke loose as a group of very angry men spilled out. Shouting abuse, they tore our clothes off the trees and kicked them in the dust, while we stared uncomprehendingly. In the excitement David lost his footing, and came crashing down the rockface to land, semi-conscious, on the barbed wire. There was a sudden uncomfortable silence, while everyone assessed the situation. Then we were bundled into the vans.
Expelled from Delphi, we’ve set up camp on the ancient acropolis above Amfissa. David is in hospital with concussion and a lot of stitches. It turns out that, quite innocently, we spent the night in the grove of Apollo, bathed in the water of the Sacred Well, and cooked our breakfast on an altar stone.
At Sounion, where we went to view the sunset, we crept round the barbed wire that ended at the cliff face, and spent the night in the temple to watch the dawn alone, before slipping away.
August 1962 – Crete: We arrived in Ayios-Nikolaos at lunch-time, after a gruelling ride over the mountains from Heraklion. Sitting on the beach recovering, we were plagued by kids demanding cigarettes. Tourists are a rarity here, so we are the object of curiosity and expectation. Expectation was crushed when I explained we did not smoke. One of the kids lobbed a stone, half in play but with a hint of resentment; but it hit a tired and irritable David, who grabbed the culprit and ducked him in the sea. He emerged tearful, and picking up another stone, this time threw it in earnest. Then his friends started to do the same and we were forced to retreat as the stones were accurate and dangerous, and we were protected only by our rucksacks. We fled over the bluff into a small sandy cove where an old man was sitting at a table in front of his hut at the top of the beach. He sensed something was up, and as we approached, out of breath and panting, he stood up and shouted, waving his stick in the air. The kids stopped in their tracks, crouched in the rocks and shouted abuse.
We stayed with the old man for over a week, sleeping on the roof of his hut. We bought him new crockery and ouzo, and helped water his small orchard of pomegranates and olive trees from a brackish well. Each morning at sunrise, I climbed the thyme-scented hill above the orchard and watched the sun come flaming out of a glassy blue sea. One morning, as I clambered up the rocks, a huge boulder detached itself and sped past me, almost knocking me flat, before clattering down the mountain. For a few seconds I could hear it echoing in the silence. When I reached the top I sat down. David and Peter were still asleep far below. I wondered which god had hurled that boulder.
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Byron’s signature at Sounion, 1961
Ayios-Nikolaos: the old man is nearly blind, and has charming, old-fashioned manners. He’s the wicked old man of the town – he sits in his chair on the beach and tells wartime stories like a comic hero. His speech is punctuated by machine-gun fire, and great explosions which he traces in the air with his stick. Each day he walks into town and refills a couple of old lemonade bottles with marbles in their necks, and sits with them as the bubbles rise in the warmth. He has never asked us what we are doing here, courtesy forbids. He has made us welcome like medieval pilgrims en route to the Holy Land or some great shrine. And we have been made welcome like this in every village in Greece. Grapes, rough bread, ouzo and wine are given and exchanged – everyone refuses money, and although we brought so little we seem to have spent barely any. It is four weeks now since we started to hitch here from London.
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September 1962, Switzerland: Last night I spent at the youth hostel at the end of the St Gothard pass. I had no money left, so I had to beg them to let me in. They agreed, on condition I did some housework. I also had my first meal for nearly two days. It is very cold, after the warm nights in Greece. At eight in the morning I started hitching, shivering at the roadside in my jeans, with a filthy rucksack, and so brown I must have looked like a gypsy. I expected it to be as difficult as the day before – Switzerland was the hitch-hiker’s nightmare. After only ten minutes a car ground to a halt, with a tough-looking middle-aged man inside. I asked him if he was going in the direction of Basel, and he said OK. He got out, locked my dirty rucksack in the boot, as he thought it might mark his upholstery – and then we were off. After about fifteen minutes he announced he had to make a phone call – and when he returned he said he could take me all the way to Basel, but that as it was early, and he was in no hurry, we’d go over the mountains. Although I wanted to press on, because of my money situation, I agreed: I’d reach the border, and the day was pleasant and sunny.
The car left the main road and began to climb along a country lane, and then up into the pine forests until suddenly, without warning, my lift drove off the road and ground to a halt in the trees. Without a moment’s hesitation, he grasped me around the shoulder and tried to kiss me, while with the other hand he unzipped his flies. Before I took in what was happening, he had my hand in an armlock and was trying to make me suck his cock. We struggled for a moment, with him threatening that if I didn’t do what I was told he’d leave me where I was and report me to the police for assault. The whole business was so sudden and unexpected, and he seemed totally crazy. I managed to struggle free and get out of the car – then realised that my rucksack, with my passport, was locked in the back. By now I was on the point of breaking down. He seemed to soften up a little. But when I climbed back into the car he grabbed my cock so hard I gasped with pain. Then he slammed the door and reversed out of the wood, and for the next half-hour drove like a maniac along the narrow roads in silence glowering at me. Suddenly, at a junction, he slammed on the brakes, jumped out and, opening the boot, hurled the rucksack on the roadside. He bellowed at me in Suisse-Deutsch, and finally drove off, leaving me so distressed that I must have cried for nearly an hour, sitting on the kerb. Then a truck pulled up, and a boy shouted out, asking me where I was going. He was another hiker, by the name of Hans Dieter Hengstenberg, and to my relief took me home to his house in Basel.
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Northwood, 1962
At the first opportunity I shut up the books on Anglo-Saxon and imperial history and was off over the garden wall to our neighbour’s, Güta, where I would quietly let myself in and tiptoe up to the attic she had given me. Here I painted a series of landscapes from tins of cheap Brodie and Middleton oil paint. I was hardly aware of American painting – the influences were English: William Scott and Paul Nash who had succeeded Stanley Spencer in my affections. ‘The inspiration of the megaliths’ spawned charcoal drawings of Kilve in Somerset which were pinned to the walls.
Sometimes Güta would hear me open the door and intercept me, and we would sit in the kitchen and talk for hours of gardens over a cup of tea. Gardens and flowers were a mutual obsession, and then I’d bring down the canvases for her inspection: the deep-red fields of the Quantocks with clumps of trees brooding under grey skies, and the slate-grey seashore at Kilve with its muddy rock pools.
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A First News Clip
5 May 1961: from the Express. 350 works by students in art show opened by Lord Birket at the University of London Union.
Professional Class – students studying art and planning to make it their career:
First Prize of £25 to David Hockney (Royal College of Art).
Amateur Class – students whose first subject is not art:
First Prize of £20 to Michael Derek Jarman (Kings College).
Moving Out
In my last year at Kings – 1963 – I left my parents’ home in Northwood and moved up to London, to an unfurnished flat in Marchmont Street near Russell Square, which I shared with Michael Ginsborg and an old schoolfriend, Dougal Campbell. Through Michael, who was studying medicine at Kings, I became friendly with a very handsome, dark-haired theologian, Roger Jones, who had flunked a drama course to study theology. Roger lived at the mission in Bethnal Green – almost every Sunday I would take off without an A–Z into the unknown – and like a homing pigeon arrive by instinct some two hours later at his door.
After weeks of self-debate, I sat with him one evening and told him I thought I was homosexual. I was terrified that this revelation might destroy our friendship. He was very sympathetic, but had no real solution. I told him about my Swiss experience, and he said we must approach the whole thing with caution. The telling helped, but the whole subject seemed as obscure and remote as my Anglo-Saxon studies. So I returned home and while my flatmates went out to the pub, played myself to sleep with Gregorian chant.
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American Action and Fine Art – The Slade, 1963
Growing up in the 1950s we dreamed the American dream. England was grey and sober. The war had retrenched all the virtues – Sobriety and Thrift came with the Beveridge plan, utility furniture, and rationing, which lasted about a decade after the end of hostilities. Over the Atlantic lay the land of cockaigne; they had fridges and cars, TV and supermarkets. All bigger and better than ours. Food parcels arrived with unheard-of luxuries: bubble-gum and chocolate, fruit cakes wrapped in comics – all virtually unobtainable here. Then, as the decade wore on, we were sent Presley and Buddy Holly, and long-playing records of West Side Story, and our own Pygmalion transformed. The whole daydream was wrapped up in celluloid, and presented nightly at the ‘Odious’ at the end of every high street in the land. How we yearned for America! And longed to go west.
In 1960 every young English artist had an eye across the Atlantic. Four years before, Richard Hamilton, one of those Ur figures of English art, whom the glossies announced as ‘seminal’ in ‘Just what makes today’s home so different, so appealing’, realised the dream with the cunning of an ad-man, and invented Pop.
Here we have a dream room, narcotically Hollywood, where even the light which lit the bodies-beautiful was emblazoned with FORD. A little later the Americans themselves got in on their own act – Jasper Johns covered the walls of every gallery in the ‘free’ world with the stars and stripes, J. Edgar Hoover slept more soundly in his imperial bed, for the last great binge of Capital was on.
Now everything had to be new. Modernism became mass-production. We eagerly accepted it. There were new designs for houses, clothes and cars. A new world with a bright young President and his glamorous lady in the White House.
The English art world quickly decided the canvas ad was bigger, brighter and therefore better in the USA. ‘Go west young man!’ and David Hockney did, trail-blazing for a whole generation. What price Typhoo tea or the Bradford Public Baths when you could sit in the sun by a pool in Los Angeles? What price all this? Later, we would find out that you were invited to admire, not to partake … The real prizes were for the home-grown product, washed around the world on an ocean of tax-deductible dollars. In the meantime, every young English artist kept a suitcase half-packed. I myself waited for the BUNAC charter that in June 1964 would take me along the same great highway.
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March 1964. Camden
After I switched the lights off I lay in the dark with my heart pounding. Then Ron said, ‘Why don’t you come over to my bed, it’s really cold in here.’ I nearly fell over in the haste with which I crossed the room – in case he changed his mind. I leapt into his bed. Each time I touched him it was like an electric shock. He had beautiful hair, blond, like silk, and really smooth skin. He was about the same height as me, but better built. He worked as a lifeguard at the swimming pool at Calgary University, where he was doing his degree. We stared at each other for ever in the darkness and every time I touched him he laughed.
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In the morning, when I was half-asleep, Ron slipped out of the house: later when I got up I asked Roger and Brenda for the number of the house where Ron was staying. When they said they didn’t have it the roof of the world caved in.
All day at the Slade I paid no attention to what I was doing, and at the first moment rushed back to Camden. There was no news from Ron. By six o’clock some dark force overwhelmed me. I seized Brenda’s dressmaking scissors and in a blank frenzy hacked my paintings which hung on the living-room wall into shreds. Roger, who was also in tears by now, took hold of the scissors, imagining I was about to turn them on myself.
The canvas hung in limp tatters off the stretchers, and I sat motionless on the sofa as the great tide, the years of repression and self-hatred rolled away, leaving me like an empty shell from which a dark death’s-head moth had escaped. We stared at each other in the silence, and Roger and Brenda vowed they would find Ron.
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June 1964. New York
My charter to the States cost £54 return, and the unlimited ninety-nine days for $99 Greyhound ticket, another £20. I’m here until late September, for nearly three months. And today I’m going off to Calgary, where I’m meeting Ron. We are going to get a job together, as I’ve very little money.
My first night in New York was spent in a stifling hot room in the Knickerbocker Hotel, which came free with the air ticket. We were crammed eight to a small room.
In the morning I phoned Roger’s friend John, an Episcopalian priest who said he’d put me up at the Henry Street mission in Greenwich Village. And so, I met up with him at the Episcopalian headquarters near the United Nations building, and he piled me into a cab. We’d hardly gone a block before his hand was on my crotch. I decided the best course was to pretend it wasn’t happening, and stared resolutely at the architecture whizzing by, hoping that the taxi-driver wouldn’t notice. At the mission in Henry Street I found all the priests were after me, all of them unbelievably forward. I felt as though I were a lottery ticket.
They all wear blue jeans, T-shirts and look just like garage mechanics – if it weren’t for the black wooden crosses worn over the T-shirts. Not at all like the dear old C of E reverends. I tried to act as if I were used to all of this. Two of them insisted that I sleep between them, and didn’t allow me to get a wink. On Sunday we went to an Episcopalian church which they called ‘Mary on the Verge’, where the altar boys were all strikingly good-looking, and spent the entire service cruising the all-male congregation, winking at them through clouds of incense and lace.
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July, Calgary: As we climbed in the Rockies this morning, Ron disturbed me with grizzly bear stories – so that when we saw a white mountain goat which stared at us before clattering off over the moraine, I convinced myself it was only a matter of moments before a ravenous grizzly poked its face through the scrub. Apparently, they attack on sight and are carnivorous. Last year one attacked some campers, and a boy who failed to get out of his sleeping-bag quick enough had his head bitten off!
It was a brilliant sunny day, and after a couple of hours climbing we reached the top of a ridge between two snow-covered mountains. The ridge itself was capped with snow and over the edge was a sheer precipice. We were looking into a vast bowl in the mountains, with cliffs on all sides from which waterfalls plunged for hundreds of feet, sparkling in the sunlight, before disappearing in the dark forest below. In the distance, mountain after snow-capped mountain as far as the eye could see. An Altdorfer vision which murmured like the sea in a shell. Around us it was unutterably quiet. We made snowballs and threw them into the void.
Later, we sat eating the picnic lunch we’d brought with us from Calgary on the side of a deep cutting in the pine forests, through which the Canadian Pacific runs. You could hear the train far below, hooting like an owl in the night – Wooooo wooooo. We’d drunk rather a lot of wine and Ron suggested making love right there, as the train went past. After a moment’s hesitation we both climbed out of our clothes, and sat looking at each other in the sunlight. Ron looks radiant, a beautiful brown from sun-bathing while looking after the pool. Then the train – Wooooo wooooo. I started to put my pants back on when Ron grabbed me to prevent me and we fell wrestling on top of our clothes while the train passed, very slowly, by. Wooooo wooooo. Neither of us dared look up as the glass observation carriages, packed with trippers, passed within a few feet of where we lay in each other’s arms, breathless and still.
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I’d arrived in Calgary in time for the stampede. At the bus station Ron was waiting for me, and for an idyllic few weeks we shared the basement rumpus room at 20 Ave NE. During the days I worked on the city land survey, making nearly $100 a week. After work I’d join Ron at his swimming-pool. We spent nearly all our spare time in the countryside, sitting sunning ourselves on huge flat glacial rocks, spread along the icy sparkling rivers which rushed down from the Rockies, or climbed the mountains. Outside our windows Ron’s Russian neighbours cultivated opium poppies which they picked every morning to make their opium tea. In the bookshop I bought all the City Lights poetry books that had been so difficult to buy in London. Corso and Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and Kerouac, including Henry Miller’s Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch: and when it was time to go, took off to the south after Ron had promised to return to England early next year:
In the common silence
of the world the white
Poppies of my love are dancing.
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November 1982. Berkeley
California. The sweet dream of capitalism curdles – where the seasons are scrambled. Minds seep away at the boundaries, snowdrops bloom with mesembryanthemums. There’s a camelia and apples hanging on the tree. Palm trees and daffodils. In the land of institutionalised insecurity: Pat says guns are a feminist issue, and the boy on the plane with the tattoos and flared jeans complains he’s defenceless – they’ve packed his rifle in the hold.
While Kenneth and I curl up on the futon it just rains outside … Breakfast is our only meal – all else is soggy mayonnaise-soaked sandwiches. Kenneth has been mugged because he wandered over the boundary of the ghettos. Off we go to Nepenthe, down the highway to Big Sur, Nepenthe the drug of forgetfulness.
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August 1964: My Beatles hat which cost me a fortune – £8 – in Herbert Johnson’s has paid dividends, as everywhere I’ve travelled it’s made me instantly recognisable as the most desirable of foreigners – an inhabitant of swinging London. Hitching up the coast from San Simeon to San Francisco, with the hat, has been easy, the people extraordinarily friendly. Some girls asked me if we had chocolate in England, offering me a Hershey bar! When I told them that in my childhood I lived in a house parts of which were seven hundred years old they looked sad. ‘You must be very poor,’ they said. This puzzled me, until I remembered everything has to be brand-new in California.
I picked up a stoned boy on a bike called Michael, and we drove for a couple of hours up the coast. We booked into a cabin at the motel at Big Sur!! It was set in the Redwoods alongside a stream, and here we carried on smoking his grass. The oranges of Hieronymous Bosch. Tomorrow we’re off to Monterey, where Joan Baez and Dylan sing.
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September 1964, NYC: When I got into the Greyhound terminal I was exhausted after the non-stop ride from San Francisco. I tossed a coin for which of the Reverends I’d ring – the least obnoxious, as Ron would say – and decided on Tom, who without hesitating invited me round. When I got to his place, he told me there was no time to unpack as we were going to a party. All I wanted to do was to go to sleep, but he wouldn’t leave me behind. So we arrived at a small flat which was so packed that people were hanging out of the windows. In the centre of the room a gang of black drag queens were swishing around announcing they were the most ‘glamorous’, and when some weedy-looking white drag queen took them on in the beauty stakes the room divided, and it nearly started a fight in which someone pulled a knife. I took refuge in a bedroom with a black boy, Marshall Hill, who was at art college – painting. We curled up on the floor and made love.
Afterwards, I was so drunk and exhausted, deprived of food and sleep, he offered to drive me back as Tom had disappeared, leaving me stranded. Tom hadn’t arrived home, so we lay on the carpet outside the front door and fell asleep in each other’s arms. When Tom arrived back at 4.30 I asked him if Marshall could come in and stay. He began shouting, telling us we were a disgrace and threw me and my luggage into the hallway and slammed the door. So much for Christian charity – Marshall and I spent the rest of the day sightseeing, then he took me out to the airport in the evening more dead than alive.
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