It’s always been the same for me, as far as Jason Lancaster and his clique were concerned. It had certainly been no picnic a few years earlier: particularly if in 1975 you were an eleven-year-old boy living in south-east London with a heavy fringe and a picture of Abba glued to your satchel. No, sir! There was a warped hierarchy in play even then, a junior pecking order in which, I confidently pressumed, I languished fairly far down. At the very top of this pre-pubescent social pile were the boys who rode skateboards in the Co-op car park, the boys who kicked footballs against the garages in the flats: the ones who swore, and smoked Rothmans at the bus stop. These were the boys who packed a punch – then and now, the same ones who name-called us across the street as we walked home from school. The rough boys, we called them; and they were all-powerful.
Me and Frances Bassey were fairly frequently the unfortunates who were singled out for sundry abuse by the rougher boys around and about East Dulwich and, in particular, the street I lived on, Chesterfield Street. I was generally ‘bender’ or ‘poofter’ as far as they were concerned – I could never quite grasp why – whereas Frances, more often than not, was nig-nog. Not especially inventive, I grant you, but these invectives, though deficient in originality, got the point across. Frances, my dearest friend and closest ally even then, was always far sharper than me. Once, during half-term, Gary Hoskin dared to shout ‘golliwog’ after her as she sauntered up the road with a Jubbly. Frances turned on her heel and without missing a beat warned Gary that her uncle was Idi Amin, President of Uganda, and that if he cussed her once more Idi would be around to fuck him up. I recall thinking at the time that this was a fairly savvy retort for a twelve-year-old, and I wished that I’d had the wherewithal to be even half as canny as Frances was; but I, typically, at the first sign of altercation, put my head down and ploughed on to the sanctuary of number twenty-two, mortified and completely unable to fathom why, of all people, these repugnant boys had singled me out as a queer.
I suppose it has to be said, though, looking back, that I was never likely to garner a huge amount of street cred, what with my mum coming out at six thirty every weeknight into the tree-lined road where we all played, shrieking, ‘David, Crossroads is starting!’, particularly since none of the other kids my age, boys or girls, seemed to recognize the intrinsic wonder of soap operas in the way that I did. I followed, for instance, The Archers with my nan every single lunchtime in the school holidays, and adored the magnificent Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street. Most of all, though, I was absolutely and completely fanatical about the five-nights-a-week, continuing story of a family-run motel in the Midlands that was … Crossroads.
‘Let’s play at Crossroads!’ I would oft demand of Chrissy during the summer holidays, insisting that she play the part of Meg Richardson, the show’s formidable middle-aged matriarch and motel owner; while I would, more often than not, take the part of the alluring and, to my mind, glamorous waitress, Diane Parker – who was blonde and had astonishingly shiny hair. Our version of Crossroads was actually set in our father’s pigeon loft, and some of the episodes I concocted and directed there were, I felt, even more thrilling and nail-biting than the real thing. These included storylines involving multiple-car motorway pile-ups, stillborn children, and once – in a genius cross-procreation with my other favourite television show – Daleks invading the motel and exterminating all the guests in the dining room who had failed to use their silverware in the proper sequence. Chrissy and I dearly loved our own private Crossroads motel with its wooden hatches and its cooing, seed-pecking patrons, but it was a game I could never share with the other children on Chesterfield Street – and especially not with the rough boys. They surely wouldn’t have understood, and I’d have been cut down yet again.
I seemed to fare little better on the social scale in the cut-throat environment we light-heartedly called primary school. Boys like me, who fled from a football and winced at war games, dared not hobnob with the girls (much as I was drawn to them, in terms of the playground at least). This would merely antagonize and incite the more boorish soccer captains and would-be Lotharios amongst the boys, exposing their ineptitude and inability to relate in any way to the opposite sex outside of a hand up the skirt. Therefore, boys who fraternized with girls were themselves considered girls and would, at some juncture, get a decent kicking for it. My own wretched downfall in the classroom had come swiftly, and without warning, one rainy afternoon shortly before my eleventh birthday. Mrs O’Beng had set our class an essay, mapping out what career paths we thought we might like to follow when we eventually left school. She had then chosen a selection of the completed essays to read aloud to the class, including, rather unnecessarily, I felt, my submission, in which I’d expressed my fervent ambition to become Doctor Who’s assistant. There was no coming back from that, really. That’s where the downturn started, and the rise of the rough boys became evident. Even the happy-go-lucky Frances copped it more often than she’d have liked, despite her sustained and evident pluck. On more than one occasion at playtime, or as we’d wander along Lordship Lane with our swimming stuff, she’d sob silently, as one of those wretched boys would shout at us. Something along the lines of ‘Look at the gay Starr and his darkie girlfriend,’ it would be, or, if they couldn’t be bothered to cobble together an entire coherent insult, ‘Wog’ would ultimately suffice.
‘It’s just words, Frances,’ I would say in an attempt to console her. ‘They’re just fucking kids. It doesn’t actually mean anything.’
‘You don’t understand, David,’ she told me once. ‘It’s not just me. I hear people say those things to my mum and dad, too. Not children: grown-ups, saying those things to other grown-ups. It doesn’t get any better when you get older. You just wouldn’t understand.’
And then she’d always turn around and stick two fingers up at whichever little tosspot had been hurling the abuse.
‘You’ve got big mouths and small dicks,’ she’d shout.
And I don’t think I did really understand. Not then.
On one sticky Saturday three years ago, when the men of Chesterfield Street had stripped to the waist to wash their Ford Capris, my nan and my Auntie Val had been off to the shops for a quarter of boiled bacon and some pearl barley, so I’d trotted along. As we passed number eight, there was Jason Lancaster, swinging on the gate of his untidy front garden. Jason had cultivated a deep loathing of me ever since I’d dressed his flock-haired, eagle-eyed Action Man up as Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie when we were nine, so I tended to give him a fairly wide berth whenever possible. I remember I’d nestled myself snugly in between my nan and my Aunt Val as we walked past, secure in the knowledge that Jason would never dare commence his customary public haranguing of me while I was flanked by two redoubtable ladies such as these. No way! On this occasion, however, I was horribly mistaken.
‘Oh! Hello, ducky,’ he shouted in a macabre pantomime-dame tone as he spotted me. ‘You look very gay today.’
I stopped in my tracks, the ugliness of what had happened swallowing me fast. I’d been used to this kind of remark, yes, but this was surely the first time that anyone in my family had witnessed it. What could they possibly think Jason Lancaster had meant by that remark? Were they appalled by some unspeakable realization about me? I suddenly felt as if the safe arms of my home life – a world in which I had always felt cosseted and loved – had been sullied in the most terrible and irreversible way: my grandmother and my mother’s sister had been exposed to all my hitherto private uncertainties and terrors in one split second. I have never forgotten the cringing and knotting of that defining moment: desperate to be noble and clever and composed, in truth I was just an unshielded little boy. I felt naked.
Aunt Val, of course, had snapped back at Jason as quick as you like.
‘Get out of it, you snotty little fucker!’ she barked.
‘And tell your mother she needs to wash them nets out, dirty bastard,’ Nan added matter-of-factly as Jason scuttled away. It was some paltry retribution, I suppose, but the damage had been well and truly done.
That night when I got home I told Mum I didn’t want to watch Crossroads any more.
The weird thing was, I didn’t even particularly understand what a poof was, or what a queer did to incite such disdain. If television was anything to go by, a lot of them seemed to host game shows, or were featured in situation comedies in fashionable clothes, and those ones seemed enormously popular as far as I could make out, so quite why being queer was considered so bloody god-awful I couldn’t fathom. On a chilly evening just before Christmas in 1975, though, things became a little less cloudy when I sat down with my mother and my Auntie Val to watch a new TV drama called The Naked Civil Servant. The turbulent life story of Quentin Crisp had been somewhat of a revelation to me, to say the least. Quite apart from the fact that this outrageous, fearless and, in my opinion, rather fantastic creature had been parading around London fifty years ago, wearing mascara, nail varnish, lipstick and attire that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the King’s Road in the present day, another significant part of the equation had also been filled in for me. Queers had sex with other men.
‘He was a very brave man,’ my Aunt Val had remarked as we all sat glued to this enthralling tale. ‘In those days, being a homosexual was illegal – you could get put in prison.’
‘Really?’ I’d said, sipping my R. Whites cream soda, not quite believing her. ‘Just for wearing a bit of make-up?’
‘Not so much that,’ Mum said, appearing a little uncomfortable. ‘But for doing it with another man; you could have certainly been banged up for that.’
‘Doing what, exactly?’ I asked her.
‘Sex!’ Aunt Val said loudly. ‘It was against the law for two men to have sex up until a few years ago, you know.’
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘How strange. And do they do the same as what men and women do when they have sex?’
‘Sort of …’ Mum said.
‘But they do it up the back passage,’ Aunt Val clarified, ‘which, I should imagine, is quite bloody painful.’
Mum nodded.
‘It is,’ she said, under her breath.
I remember, quite clearly, being intrigued and appalled all at once as I mulled over this fresh information during the adverts. So that’s what all the fuss was about, I said to myself as I watched Rodney Bewes extolling the virtues of Bird’s Eye Cod in Parsley Sauce to busy housewives countrywide. That’s why the rough boys considered being queer so ghoulishly abhorrent: they must have known about this all along – so why didn’t I? And come to think of it, how did any of this apply to me anyway? I didn’t have sex with men. I hadn’t had sex with anyone, or even considered it. It wasn’t something that I felt was high on my list of priorities, to be frank – not like getting my Look-in comic every week, or saving up for a Three Degrees LP. And as for make-up, well, I didn’t wear that either – so that was that theory out of the window. In fact, apart from trotting round my nan’s front garden in a pair of my Aunt Val’s lilac suede ankle-strapped platforms a couple of times the previous summer, I really couldn’t think of anything that would induce those terrible boys to tar me with any sort of ‘homo’-related brush. I was sure of one thing, though, as I watched the end credits of The Naked Civil Servant roll, the very next day at school, some smart arse would undoubtedly – in front of an entire class, or playground full of people – call me ‘Quentin’!
And sure enough …