LOVE VERSUS SEX
While still at the Marlborough clinic I met Pietro on the back row of the popular newsreel and cartoon cinema in Piccadilly Circus. It was known for between-male fumbling, but not so brazen as the notorious Biograph cinema near Victoria Station, where few of the predominantly male audience paid attention to the films and the door to the toilet was constantly creaking open and shut. I was almost thirty and Pietro, a handsome, dark haired Italian, was eight years younger. He came home with me and we enjoyed a passionate time. He was not put off by the presence of my old sex mate and flat mate John, but this lack of jealousy was to prove illusory, and our incompatibility on this score was to blight our lives for years to come. The first flush of ‘love’ apparently overwhelmed all other considerations. He soon quit his lodgings to come to my bed. Soon after, he was obliged to pay a short visit to his parents. When he did not return as soon as expected, in great anxiety I took off on impulse for Italy, only to find on arriving at his astonished parents’ house that he had just left to return to London.
Pietro had vague pretensions to distant aristocratic lineage. His father had been chief of the police attached to the court of Victor Emmanuel III. The family fortunes disappeared during the Second World War, with the destruction of their home by the invading Germans, the deaths on military service of two brothers and the profligacy of his third surviving brother. He was an unexpectedly late addition to the family. By the time I met him his elderly parents were living in greatly reduced circumstances. His decision to seek work in England had been influenced by a flirtation after the war with one of the many servicemen of the American occupation. Under the regulations in force at that time, British work permits for foreigners were obtainable only in the catering trade or the coal mines. Having started off as a waiter at the Gloucester Hotel in Weymouth, once the summer palace of George III, he was now on shift work at the Colony, a fashionable West End restaurant. Although not lacking in muscular strength and vigour, he had had kidney disease in youth, suffered bouts of renal colic, and later on developed coronary disease with severe angina. He was finding the shift work at the Colony irksome and exhausting and, yet again, my father stepped in to help and secured him a place at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane, where he was much happier and his Italian charm was popular with clients, including celebrities such as the ageing singer Gracie Fields and her Italian husband.
By this time I had acquired my first car, a Ford ‘Popular’, at the low range of the market, but effective. Sometimes I would use it to collect Pietro after work, waiting in the small hours in the street behind the hotel, watching the waiters emerging from the service entrance carrying parcels of food, presumably left-overs from rich dinners. We had a kitten given to me by a patient. It benefited from the tit-bits of meat and game that Pietro used to bring home. I never ventured into the hotel myself when fetching him, except once, when I brought the cat with me. Pietro had been chatting with a hotel guest (Lady Ellerman, of shipping line fame) and had mentioned the cat and she asked to see it. Accordingly, we carried it up to the luxurious suite she occupied, where it promptly began clawing the Aubusson carpet. I was horrified, but she was just amused, saying “Let the little thing play”. This trivial incident stuck in my mind as emblematic of the freedom of the rich. Pietro worked at that hotel until his period of directed labour expired and he could take up whatever work he might find.
Before the enforced departure from the SPR flat in 1956, after much searching, I found accommodation for Pietro and myself and my two remaining lodgers in Rosslyn Hill, a busy shopping street in Hampstead. The lease was for sale at a very modest price. The previous occupant had killed herself, using an unlit gas oven. The flat occupied two stories in a tall building, with more floors above, two small shops on the ground floor and a reinforced basement that had served as an air raid shelter during the war. After moving in, I was able to purchase the freehold of the whole building for what today would be an absurdly low price – perhaps because the top floor was occupied by communists on a tiny, fixed rent. In return for a modest payment they agreed eventually to leave.
The relationship with Pietro having become the most important thing in life, I tried to devise an arrangement that would keep us together and provide a social cover for our association. In the Fifties, inexpensive coffee bars were popular among young people and the Hampstead basement, which had just become vacant, seemed just the right place for one. As owner of what would count as a catering business, I could apply for a work permit to employ Pietro. On leaving hotel work, he could run the coffee bar. After an anxious wait, and the intervention of an SPR member with political connections, the permit was refused, but a better opportunity arose.
One of the social workers at the Marlborough clinic mentioned to me that her hobby was buying and selling antique furniture. I suggested our basement as a place for keeping her goods. She became bored with the enterprise rather quickly, and as Pietro’s period of directed labour was coming to an end, and he had some knowledge of antiques, I proposed that we open a tiny antiques shop together, with me the sleeping partner – in both senses of the word. Work began even before Pietro left shift work at the Dorchester. Hedda Carington, widow of the psychical researcher mentioned previously, who had come to the rescue once before when I was ill, acted as temporary shop minder. She was a Bohemian character, but a very loving, loyal friend. I recall her draped in a home-knitted black cape, riding a motor cycle or driving an open-air car with a pet raven circling above, to the astonishment of bystanders. Daughter of a German judge, she had been questioned by the Gestapo on account of her known dissident associations and fled across mountains into Czechoslovakia to rendezvous with and marry Whately Carington. She was a gifted artist and potter who went on exhibiting till a late age. There was no need to ‘come out’ to her as a gay couple, her unspoken acceptance was clear.
As the years went by, one after the other the ground floor shops became vacant and we expanded into them. We named the business Pilgrim’s Place Antiques, after the covered way that led under the house to cottages belonging to the Rosslyn Hill Chapel next door. It sounded romantic, but actually Pilgrim was the builder responsible for the row of buildings erected in the late nineteenth century. For Pietro it was a full time occupation. The occasions we attended auctions together, or made excursions to the countryside looking for bargains in local second-hand shops, were for me very happy times. The informality of our arrangements included having customers sometimes coming up to our sitting-room on the first floor. Ornaments and furniture that were admired, even the dining table, were apt to become stock and sold off. Our activity made a tiny profit, but that was not its main purpose. It kept us together and long after going to work in Cambridge in 1960 I was still able to participate in some buying excursions (charged as shop expenses!), help with the book-keeping and tax returns and occasionally mind the shop on Saturday mornings, when Pietro ran a stall at Portobello Market.
Contact with the low end of the antiques market was an interesting experience. People would bring to stallholders at Portobello articles for sale of dubious provenance. So-called ‘runners’ had no shop of their own, but having acquired something from one shop or stall that they knew another would likely be interested in, they would carry it around offering it for sale. One Saturday a man brought Pietro a jug with a small crack that he recognised immediately as coming from his shop. He asked to be allowed to hang onto it for a few minutes while he consulted a friend about its value. He phoned home and asked me to look on the shelf where it had been. The gap was evident. When the man returned he quickly fled when Pietro said he knew where the jug had come from.
Some dealers’ houses were Aladdin’s caves full of items hoarded over the years that they did not like to part with. Some were moonlighting from other jobs or dealing more as a hobby than as fulltime life-supporting work. Some pretended not to be dealers, but continually stacked their homes with goods that they sold off periodically. We became friends with a lesbian couple who ran an antiques and restaurant business in the countryside, one of them with impressively aristocratic relatives. Their situation reminded me of the eighteenth century ‘Ladies of Llangollen’. We frequently bought items for resale from them. It was common practice for dealers to buy from each other as sale prices increased substantially when items reached more fashionable areas or shops dealing in a specialised range, such as oriental ceramics or antique clocks. At one well-known London auction house we got to know one of the porters who had an antiques shop of his own in Brighton. He would alert his friends when some interesting items, perhaps hidden among a mixed lot, were coming up. There were also groups of dealers who would keep prices down by agreeing in advance not to bid against each other, but afterwards auction off the spoils among themselves. Shopkeepers handling an indiscriminate medley of goods had limited ability to authenticate and date the objects they had on sale. I once told a customer I should not be an assistant in a modest little shop if I possessed the information he was wanting.
Many politicians lived in the Hampstead area and well-known characters were among our clients. Pietro was never intimidated and could sometimes be alarmingly cheeky. When a gentleman came in accompanied by a younger lady and announced grandly “My name is Wedgwood Benn”, Pietro, who perfectly well knew who he was, when given a cheque for payment, asked him to write his name and address on the back. Another time, when he got into an argument with the future Baroness Gaitskill, who wanted him to take back an item which he felt sure she had accidentally damaged herself, he blurted out “You’re not the first lady yet”. Very soon after, her husband, who was in line to become prime minister, took ill and died unexpectedly. Equally characteristically, Pietro, remembering what he had said, was much upset. For myself, I would have been more obsequious. When I used the car to deliver a piece of furniture to the Gaitskills’ house in Frognal, I doubt I would have refused a tip, had one been offered.
One anxious incident occurred while Pietro was still working at the Dorchester and had a day or two free from shifts. We drove into the country looking for antiques and arrived at a modest hotel late in the evening. This was at the height of the cold war scare and Pietro’s foreign accent must have aroused the curiosity of the man who booked us in. At any rate he alerted the police, who were looking through hotel registers. I was woken in the night by voices in the next room. It was the police, who took Pietro to the station, detaining him there overnight until they had contacted the authorities in London to confirm his status as an immigrant worker. Fortunately we had obtained separate rooms. To be found sleeping together might have led to more serious questions.
A more pleasant memory is of the much spoiled pet cat, the one who visited the Dorchester. We both became very attached to her and we could only take holidays together when suitable arrangements were made for her care, which from time to time meant Hedda stepping in as house sitter. When I moved to Cambridge and acquired a garden Pietro rescued a baby thrush that had fallen from a tree and been deserted by its mother. He fed it with a dropper and it survived. It was kept indoors with Pietro constantly steering away the cat from molesting it. Considering the cat’s unsuccessful attempts to catch pigeons, it seems a miracle she never attacked this bird. In time they grew to tolerate each other, sometimes feeding from the same dish. The cat had the habit of sleeping in the shop window and the thrush would perch on its back. Local residents would call in with gifts of worms. As time went by the bird would fly out of the window and spend the night in a tree. I transported it by car to Cambridge, perched much of the time on the steering wheel, hopping from side to side to keep erect when the car made a turn. We released it back into the garden from whence it came and for a long time it used to return, still half tame. The story of this bird, complete with a photo of Pietro nursing it in his arms together with the cat, appears in a book about pets by the Cambridge psychologist Alice Heim.
Taking up work in Cambridge in 1960 caused only partial separation from Pietro as I was making frequent visits to London for the university research I was doing, and he was spending weekends and holidays at the old cottage I acquired in Milton on the outskirts of Cambridge. Milton was then a true village, but is now virtually a suburb of Cambridge with a Tesco supermarket and extensive housing development. Situated on a road leading out of the village to countryside and some locks on the River Cam, the cottage was made from two labourers’ dwellings that had been part of a terrace. The elongated sitting room, bridging the two original rooms, had a central pillar, a remnant of what had been an interior dividing wall. At each end a fireplace and a narrow steep staircase gave access to the two bedrooms. Due to the steep, tiled mansard roof they were more like attics, It was a primitive arrangement, but adequate for our needs. There was a spacious garden with an ancient cow shed and the remains of a pigsty at the far end. On one side was a farmhouse, on the other, some distance away within its own grand enclosure, was a large period house. The cottage was sufficiently unusual and picturesque to impress visitors. Pietro took an immediate liking to it and spent much time and labour converting rotting cabbage patches and a hayfield lawn into an attractive garden. The perimeter trees he planted proved useful when the next door farmer moved from his house and sold his fields, and new houses sprang up close by. New houses also appeared on the opposite neighbour’s land, the nearest of them not more than a metre from the windowless end wall of our sitting room. Luckily the neighbours on both sides proved friendly and all the years we were there showed no signs of being concerned we were gay. Both sets of neighbours kept in touch for many years after we left.
The cottage had one great advantage. An elderly, childless local couple, known as Fred and Mrs Smith, had looked after the place for previous occupants, the wife cleaning inside and Fred, a retired market gardener, seeing to the land. They had even helped when the two units of the building were being knocked into one. For the pittance that was all they would accept, they cared for us over the years as if we were their own offspring, until Fred died and the wife had to go into a nursing home. We both came to think of the cottage as our real home, even when Pietro was obliged to work far away. We entertained friends there and spent much time making small improvements, modifying the plumbing, insulating the loft and adding a shower closet and a makeshift conservatory at the rear. The only major disaster was when one night, while I was sleeping alone in the cottage, there was a loud noise and part of the roof collapsed and some of the irreplaceable old tiles were smashed.
Apart from the shop and the cottage, holiday travel was another activity that kept us together, My GP was a gay doctor who loved Morocco and took me with him for my first holiday to Tangier. At that time Tangier was a popular resort for foreigners wanting to take advantage of the plethora of young Moroccans offering themselves for sex at modest prices. Pietro did not want to participate in the gay scene, but he went with me many times to Morocco where we both enjoyed driving round the endlessly varied countryside, from the mild Mediterranean coast and across the Atlas ranges, stretching from lush terrain, through gorges and waterfalls and the bare Anti-Atlas to the arid south and the beginnings of the dune-swept Sahara. It was only in later years, following the 1975 ‘Green March’, when Morocco occupied the old Spanish Sahara, that it became possible to drive beyond TanTan (opposite the Canaries) and down the wild Atlantic coast, where the desert comes down to the ocean cliffs, to the former capital Laayoune and further on to Dakhla.
Some of our trips were made in hired Renault 4s, small, sturdy, high-slung cars suited to uneven stony roads, and some in my second-hand Range Rover, which we could sleep in. The latter was used for one of our earliest and longest trips, through Morocco into neighbouring Algeria and then south across the many miles of flat, stony wasteland of the Great Erg before crossing the Sahara to Tamanrasset and the Ahaggar mountains.
It was not so long since Algeria had been in a bitter war against the French colonists and the country was not a particularly welcoming place for tourism. Entering Algeria was a dreary business of bureaucratic delays. Arriving at a grand-looking hotel we were ushered in by attendants who left us to carry our own luggage, but clearly expected tips. The accommodation included an impressive, marble-lined and well-plumbed bathroom, but no water supply! The further south one went the friendlier were the natives. We came upon an isolated Marabout, a monument which travellers were encouraged to circle round several times to ensure good luck for the rest of the journey. An old man was sitting there alone beside a feeble, coughing, emaciated boy, obviously suffering from some advanced lung disease. Though not my business, I felt somehow guilty just passing by.
Further south we were stopped by authorities who would not let us proceed without checking that we had adequate water and cans of fuel and would state our destination and agree to report to the police on arrival. At this point we hired a guide. He turned up for departure with a family of women and children and much luggage to be packed into the Range Rover. The guide took us on some alarming short cuts away from the main track. The main road of impacted sand had developed corrugations that caused vehicles to shudder unpleasantly. To avoid this, drivers would move to one side or the other, producing subsidiary tracks. As sand blew over and obscured the borders of the road it was only too easy to wander off and get lost in the desert. Perhaps this was how Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark famously lost himself in the same area. When we had a puncture and were changing the wheel, the guide and his family walked off, opened capacious parasols and began enjoying a picnic, thoughtfully sending back to us bits of tough camel meat that we had to bury in the sand to avoid giving offence. It was so hot one could not touch the metal sides of the vehicle and the carburettor had to be wrapped in wet rags to avoid vapour lock. The petrol stations were hundreds of miles apart and attracted long queues waiting for the sun to go down for the pumps to start working.
Arriving at Tamanrasset, the heat subsided and the surrounding mountains were a marked change from flat desert and mini dunes. Blue-robed Tuaregs were much in evidence. The Range Rover attracted children wanting lifts and offering to show us the swimming hole. One small boy asked us to stop off at his home to fetch his swimming trunks. A stern-looking, bejewelled Tuareg mother, quite unlike the veiled, retiring Arab women, confronted us, wanting a tip. Pietro was horrified when I suggested she might think she was selling the boy for sex. The swimming hole was a shallow pond where nothing but innocent splashing about occurred.
In the hills above Tamanrasset was a spring that was a gathering place for nomadic Tuaregs. We visited a young French student who was camping with them there. He was not an admirer of the Tuareg lifestyle. He told us they owned a herd of camels that they set free to wander and graze and then spent most of the rest of their time retrieving them. He had become bored with a diet of camel meat and eagerly devoured the tinned sardines we had with us. After a brief stay we returned to Morocco and home without a guide and without mishap.
In Morocco we thought to buy a caravan, but were persuaded by the vendor to buy instead, at a similar price, a tiny terraced house on Escalier Sidi Hosni, a passageway in the Tangier Kasbah, overlooking the Sidi Hosni Palace of Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress. It was made up of two small rooms, one above the other, a flat roof for sitting out, and a multi-function WC, consisting of an Arab style hole in the floor with a shower hose suspended above it.
The house proved a mixed blessing, but it did bring us into closer contact with the everyday life around us than if we had holidayed in tourist hotels. We were advised that, in view of regulations about foreign ownership, an additional cash sum would be needed to negotiate the allocation of the title. Of course this was euphemism for bribery. Visiting the solicitor to complete the purchase, we were whispering to each other in the waiting room when a dignified robed gentleman, sitting opposite made disapproving noises and gestures as if we were in a church. He followed us into the solicitor’s office. When the moment came to hand over the cash, he came forward, took the money, placed it neatly inside the sleeve of his robe and wished us a happy stay in Morocco. It was one of my first lessons in the importance of appearance over substance.
On another occasion, when the Moroccan who looked after the house in our absence failed to meet us on arrival, we learned he had been arrested and was in prison after involvement in a bar-room brawl. A trial was to be held in a day or two and the lawyer advised that a substantial bribe would secure his immediate release and for a lesser sum he would be free in two weeks. I opted for the latter and attended a solemn trial presided over by a pompously attired judge who, after seemingly elaborate discussion of the evidence, pronounced the predicted outcome.
Alcohol, officially condemned by Moslem law, was freely available in tourist restaurants, but not in smaller native establishments, although, in one of the latter, we saw wine being poured from teapots into cups. Cannabis, known locally as Kif, was officially banned, although the smell of it wafted from old men smoking in the surrounding cafés. Across the passage facing us was a café with posters proclaiming ‘Kif kills’. Young clients from there would sit on our doorstep and, as a friendly gesture, offer to share their cannabis, which they called facetiously ‘Moroccan whisky’. We always politely declined. In Ketema, a region where Kif growing is tolerated, boys would stand by the roadside waving bags of the stuff for passing motorists to buy. Tourists were in danger from the authorities if found in possession of it when crossing borders. Now the authorities have clamped down more heavily on drugs and illegal sex. On a more recent visit to Morocco, when driving through Ketama, progress was blocked by a large car with several young men inside who pressed me and my passenger to go with them to collect some Kif. They were quite aggressive about it, probably because their trade was under threat. I managed to start up suddenly and squeeze past, but they chased close behind for miles. I suspected there could be police checks further on and that a tourist would pay dearly for carrying cannabis.
Stop signs at ‘T’ junctions on deserted country roads can be a trap. Drivers tempted to make only a pause are confronted by waiting police wanting to register a traffic infraction. A small ‘pourboire’ usually settles the matter. From my own experience of a traffic accident, I do not envy any tourist caught up in a court case. The incident occurred as I was starting up the car, having called at a shop on a main urban road. A small, steeply sloping side road was just behind. A boy came pelting down this slope and literally ran into the back of the car. I heard a slight thud, which I thought was a football, as kids were kicking balls around in the road. On looking back I saw people running into the road, so I stopped to see what had happened. Almost immediately the police were there. Although the car was at a standstill, I was asked why I had not stopped after an accident. The boy had cut his mouth on the rear bumper. After returning to England I received a summons, forwarded from the house in Sidi Hosni, to appear at a court in Tangier. Fortunately I had taken the precaution to secure a witness to what had happened and I wrote to the court a long statement. The arrival of a demand for payment of a fine was the first I knew that a trial and conviction had taken place. Knowing that if this was not paid I would become liable for further offences, I approached the British Consul to pay the sum on my behalf. He agreed to do so, but it was a long time before he was able to get it accepted, presumably because more money could be extracted for failure to pay on time.
The King of Morocco, supposedly a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, was featured in all the newspapers taking decisions on behalf of his country. His dictatorship was not without occasional unrest. Once, when we were sun-bathing on the beach the crowd suddenly disappeared. On our way back to the house the streets were deserted and the shops closed and shuttered. We learned later that shots had been fired at the King’s plane as it approached Rabat airport. A story circulated afterwards that he had survived by grabbing the microphone connected to traffic control and shouting “The King is dead!”, causing the shooting to stop. Until the outcome was announced, the radio was playing martial music while people stayed indoors waiting. When it was known the King was still in charge they came out cheering. The execution of the officers responsible for the attempted coup, including the spectacle of their weeping relatives, was shown on TV.
At times car travel was hampered by spiked barricades slung across the roads, manned by soldiers demanding identity papers and explanations of the purpose of one’s journey. This was connected with the protracted skirmishes with Algeria, notably over the gradual take-over of the Spanish Sahara against the resistance of the Algeria-supported Pollisario. During a stay at a hotel at the foot of the famous Todra Gorges, we found on returning from a late afternoon walk that the place was emptied of guests and the bedrooms occupied by soldiers. Some ‘rebels’ had escaped into the mountains and were being chased with helicopters. We were obliged to sleep in the public rooms until the situation had quietened down.
Morocco has more than man-made excitements. Being caught in an alarming sandstorm, reaching shelter just in time, remains unforgettable. Equally startling, near Goulemine, the car entered a cloud of locusts. The windscreen was obscured and the radiator was a mass of burned insects. When the cloud passed we could not proceed before scraping the creatures out of the engine. On reaching an hotel where the doors opened onto an open courtyard, we had to shovel away a pile-up of dead locusts before we could open the door to our room.
We were still young enough to be undeterred by such incidents and to be intrigued by some Moslem habits. It was unexpected to be kept waiting at a petrol station while the attendants completed their obligatory timed prayers and it was an experience trying to shake hands with a peasant couple after we had given them a lift. The man had no problem, but the woman could give no more than a quick tap on the palm with a forefinger before hastily jumping back. During Ramadan, at a large restaurant in Casablanca, soup was served a little in advance of sundown. The spectacle of diners with spoons at the ready waiting for the signal to begin struck us as particularly amusing. When we were camping out one night in a remote area, a boy nearby was guarding some road mender’s equipment overnight. He had no watch and kept approaching us to ask the time. It was Ramadan and he was hungry. Pietro, taking pity, advanced his watch.
The Range Rover proved useful on occasion, helping some grateful young soldiers whose car was stuck in soft sand and racing a scorpion victim to hospital. Another time, when driving along an apparently dry beach, we sank into a wet patch. Luckily willing volunteers were swiftly on hand to insert a raft of planks under the vehicle so it could be jacked up sufficiently to allow rails to be pushed under the wheels enabling it to be driven off.
Enjoying the climate, the lush fruit and vegetables, the food and wine, the friendly invitations to partake of sweet mint tea (large lumps of sugar being pushed into the tea pot before serving), and the chance to buy local ceramics and rugs, we never lost nostalgia for Morocco. The availability of gay sex was another story.
Partnership with Pietro lasted forty-five years until his death, but genuine mutual devotion was marred by a seemingly irreconcilable incompatibility, for which I now feel a great burden of sorrow and guilt. Looking back on the things we were able to share peacefully together cannot obscure the memory of bitter rows and stressful periods of estrangement when life seemed not worth living and it was hard to carry on working and pretending to outsiders that there was nothing wrong.
For me, sexual enjoyment had hitherto been uninhibited by concepts of possession. Even when becoming emotionally attached to someone, the idea that sex with others should cease did not arise. Indeed ‘threesomes’ were particularly gratifying. This may seem shocking to many, and especially in someone who, in ordinary social exchanges, is timorous and compliant with convention. However, public image and private sexual conduct are often seriously dissonant. Pietro had appeared unconcerned at sharing a bed with both John and me when I first brought him home, and initially he did not demur when a former acquaintance of mine was invited home for sex, but soon he began to show disapproval in no uncertain terms. His concept of gay partnership was one of strict monogamy. The one or two ‘sex buddies’ I then had were soon put off by his sulks and rudeness towards them. I tried to conform to his wishes, but the urge to resume old habits was too strong. Resentful at having to make excuses, I began to have secret encounters. For example, a highly-sexed and handsome former ballet dancer was a customer of the antique shop and he took to calling in for quick satisfaction in our quarters above the shop when Pietro was out.
The inevitable detection of my transgressions brought endless recriminations. The depths of misery this caused us both is hard to express, but as with an unreformed drug addict or alcoholic, the urge for sexual adventure kept reasserting itself. Over time the problem took on a different guise. Denied the possibility of open sexual contacts with mutual friends, I took to visiting bars frequented by ‘rent boys’, including one in Soho patronised by the sex murderer Dennis Nilsen.
Strangely enough, John, who slept with us when we first met, was the only one of my previous sexual contacts that Pietro did not perceive as a threat and was prepared to accept as a friend. Indeed John remained a friend right up to Pietro’s death and beyond. He was critical of Pietro’s violent reactions to my behaviour and never ceased to remind me that from the outset he had warned that we were incompatible. Perhaps he was influenced by his own reluctance to make a partnership commitment. During his sea-going years he sought sex in every port and the only time he tried to settle proved a short-lived disaster. He teamed up with a young man and together they went to work for the lesbian lady friends (mentioned earlier) with the antique and restaurant business in the country. His partner’s behaviour there became so extremely histrionic it led to his admission to a psychiatric hospital! To my annoyance he gave my name to the hospital consultant as his psychiatrist! After this episode John never took up with another partner.
It was a delusion to suppose, on the basis of ‘what the eye does not see the heart does not grieve for’, that I could continue secret sex encounters without causing upheaval. While doing my best to hide things from Pietro, I hated the situation and was continually worrying about being found out, which in fact happened repeatedly, provoking days and weeks of sulks, recriminations and threats to leave. Pietro did indeed absent himself more than once, sometimes taking to his bed, neglecting the shop and fretting himself into abject and sometimes drunken states. On various occasions I promised to stop and had a sincere intention to do so, but always lapsed. In later years sex between us ceased and he adopted a distant, resentful stance that seemed to assume, correctly, that I was continually unfaithful, although I always struggled to keep evidence of that from him. For better or worse this became easier in later years as our respective employments brought about partial separations. Notwithstanding so much real misery, I never doubted that I was his and he was my most ‘significant other’. We shared our incomes, never counting who paid for what. In the early years I had more than he; later on, because he spent little, I was the beneficiary. In times of illness or other need we helped each other without question.
One-off sex with pick-ups from dubious bars carries a more than average risk of acquiring infections. I was unlucky in that, early on in my unhappy sex career, a (then) rare incident of agreeing to anal insertion produced a syphilitic infection. Initially symptomless, my first indication of something wrong was severe pain on defecation. A hospital visit produced a diagnosis of anal fissure and the loan of a dilator. No questions were asked about sex. Then came the rash. I realised I might have had an internal syphilitic sore and be in the dangerous secondary stage of the disease. Reluctant to go to a venereal disease clinic, for I had the not altogether irrational fear (in the late Fifties) that a medical career might be affected by exposure of homosexuality, I was working at Maudsley Hospital at the time and used penicillin from there to inject myself. The diagnosis was swiftly confirmed by an immediate fever – the Herxheimer reaction due to the spirochaeta being killed and releasing toxin into the blood. I took fright and attended a clinic for treatment. Given injection phials, I could continue working, retiring from time to time to the hospital toilet to stab my thigh. Throughout this drama, Pietro, initially shocked and angry, remained a loyal helper, attending the clinic to be tested (negatively) himself.
Frequenting a Soho bar filled with male prostitutes and pimps and young layabouts seeking a bed for the night, involved other risks. The former ballet dancer I first met as a client of the antique shop lived nearby and had a room he would let me use for taking back pick-ups. Perhaps because I avoided characters who gave the slightest hint of ambivalence at the prospect of sex, I almost never had trouble, believing that an honest, friendly, approach setting out what to expect, including the limited amount of money available, would produce a corresponding honest response. One time I was mistaken. An attractive, well-built Scot came back very willingly, but as soon as we were indoors he changed tone and asked for more money than we had discussed. He picked up a glass beer mug threateningly. Explaining, truthfully, that my wallet was in the car outside, we went together to collect it. As I was fishing inside the vehicle he was looking up and down the street to see if anyone was coming. This gave me a chance to leap inside, slam the door and drive off. On next visiting that same bar he was there, all smiles, suggesting we should try again.
More damaging to a stable gay partnership than casual encounters outside the home is forming commitments to third parties. The young men who haunt bars looking for older men wanting sex are usually drifters, estranged from their families, unemployed social rebels with personality problems. Although not averse to gay sex, they are not necessarily basically homosexual. When they find someone who is prepared to see them again and again a dependent relationship may develop, the younger seeking material support, the older developing an unintended attachment. This happened to me in at least two instances in which a strong attachment lated a lifetime.
George, some fifteen years my junior, had a pronounced Liverpool accent. He came from a respectable working-class background, but kept no more than distant contact with his family of origin, trying to hide from them his irregular way of life. He was rather small in stature, but lively and pugnacious, at least in his talk, explaining that to get by where he came from one had to stick up for oneself physically. He maintained that army service had led him into the heavy drinking that eventually killed him. On discharge from the forces, he teamed up with a Canadian homosexual who took him as a companion on sex tours around Europe. Before departing for home, he introduced George to the London gay scene. Instead of looking for work, George teamed up with the group of rent boys frequenting the White Bear bar in Piccadilly.
George was intelligent and capable of finding employment when he wanted, but he was attracted to heavy drinking and an undisciplined life style, and he had a talent for insinuating himself into situations that avoided the necessity for regular work. His sexual service was circumscribed. He boasted that his masturbatory techniques ensured his punters ejaculated at an early stage, avoiding the need to be anally penetrated, which he disliked. I felt what proved to be a futile urge to extricate him from his precarious existence, even finding a small employment for him, but his casual attitude put paid to that. I had more opportunities for travel abroad than Pietro could share or wanted to share, and once I took George on a trip to Morocco to our tiny house in the Tangier Kasbah.
On the fine stretch of Tangier’s sandy beach there used to be several famous bars patronised by gay male tourists attracting and surrounded by a plethora of young Moroccans obviously available for sex. In this atmosphere of seeming libertinism, George’s rash conduct was near catastrophic. Driving along the crowded promenade in Tangier, with George and a Moroccan boy he had taken a fancy to sitting in the back, to my horror, they were kissing each other openly for everyone to see. We were stopped and questioned by the police. Knowing the consequences of expulsion and a marked passport, I was terrified. In Morocco at that time the authorities were relaxed about what happened with tourists in private, but public displays were taboo. The boy was taken away, but we escaped with a warning. George insisted on trying cannabis, which he consumed in solid form. It did not take immediate effect and, against advice, he swallowed more and began to have alarming hallucinations. He remained acutely psychotic all though the night, with several young Moroccans trying to calm him and restrain his terrified shouting. On the return journey, we stopped off at a small hotel in Paris, taking a tiny room with a double bed. George was restless and went out in the middle of the night, sneaking back with an Algerian. George, who professed radical ideas derived from the thoughts of Chairman Mao, said his principles would not allow him to leave someone stranded when we had a bed. The receptionist saw the Algerian making an exit in the morning. I was threatened with the police, but finally allowed to recover our passports and leave.
These experiences should have taught me a lesson, but I persisted in seeing George and introduced him to Pietro, who took an immediate dislike to him. One reason was his drinking, which meant swigs from the whisky bottle when unobserved and trying to cover his action by surreptitiously diluting the remaining contents with water. At one stage George made friends with a young gay man who occupied a flat in the fashionable Harley Street area, provided by an older lover (who, by coincidence, was a prominent member of the SPR). George stayed there and was allowed to entertain men. I called one afternoon to see him but arrived early and found him in the company of Mr W, a businessman from the Midlands, about my own age, who was much embarrassed. Nevertheless, we became friends, and Pietro and I used to exchange enjoyable social visits with Mr W and his wife, at which the topic of homosexuality was never mentioned. George maintained his contacts with Mr W, who was clearly in love with him and invited him to come to stay at his home, hoping to rescue him from prostitution. George maintained that both Mrs W and their adult son were sexually attracted to him and that the situation was becoming emotionally fraught. When Mr W found a place for him in a colleague’s firm, George failed to turn up the first day, and simply disappeared. Mr W repeatedly asked me privately if I had any news of him, but in fact I did not see him again for some years.
Meantime, George had married and fathered children, but deserted them to live with another woman with whom he set up a home, utilising some bank finance they obtained fraudulently. He then fell ill and was hospitalised for treatment of Hodgkins disease. When discharged, he resumed contact with me hoping for help. The woman he had been living with had cut him off and the house having been put into her name he was destitute. He had me drive him to see her in the country town where they had been living, but she refused to open the door and he was left crying on the doorstep. Sex with George had ceased and Pietro, although disapproving, did not try to prevent me helping him obtain lodgings in Cambridge or allowing him to visit us occasionally.
Remarkably, George found a job, but it proved no solution because his salary had to be paid directly into a bank account where it was automatically seized as repayment of his debts. At this point he was desperate, ill with chronic bronchitis, still drinking and about to be evicted from his accommodation. I sought the help of an influential friend, who negotiated for him a local authority flat and appropriate welfare benefits. He was also registered with a GP who himself had alcohol problems and who treated him sympathetically. There was some hope that George might settle down, but his drinking was out of control and his health deteriorating. I was due to go abroad for three weeks and rang his GP to explain that I thought he was quite ill and there was nobody to see to him while I was away. The locum doctor I spoke to said she would call, but she did not. On my return I went at once to the flat and found the entrance door unlocked. Inside, he was lying dead on the floor in his underpants, in front of a still burning gas fire, in a pool of vomit, with empty cans and bottles strewn around. The body was still warm and rigor not fully set in. I ran to the pub next door asking to be allowed to ’phone 999 as there was someone dead in the flat. I was greeted with disbelieving laughter at first. (It was not a good neighbourhood).
The police, ambulance and doctor arrived, and after giving them his mother’s address in Liverpool, I left. Having a key, I returned next day to clear out the bottles and cans before his brother arrived to arrange removal of the body to Liverpool. That was the last I saw of George. It was found that he had died of untreated meningitis. For some years I received Christmas messages from his elderly mother, thanking me for having tried to befriend him. George’s story is a sad example of the near impossibility of changing an ultimately calamitous lifestyle if the person is not motivated to do so.
Tom was of similar age to George and they were friends. I can no longer remember our first encounter, but I think I met Tom first. He had a more troubled background than George. His mother was said to have married ‘beneath’ her to a labouring man and heavy drinker who turned out to be an abusive husband. They lived in North Wales in a country town where Tom’s father, always living on the edge of the law, was a professional poacher, especially of salmon, which he sold to a local luxury hotel, the very one where I was often taken as a child when on motor tours with my father’s wealthy business friend. Tom had a close attachment to his father, who taught him a love of fishing. When Tom was a teenager they worked together on itinerant jobs. Tom had never felt close to his mother. She probably thought he was taking after his father. Tom spent some time in the army as a bandsman, which he enjoyed, but he seems to have lacked discipline. He went absent without leave for no good reason, for which he served time in a military prison.
Tom was a more reliable friend than George and although hardly admitting it to myself I was in love with him. He recognised that for me Pietro would always come first and was willing to play along with any contrivances for our clandestine meetings. I tried introducing him to Pietro as a useful acquaintance to do odd jobs for us, but that produced only animosity on Pietro’s part, which Tom never reciprocated. At various times Pietro insisted I should stop seeing Tom, and I tried to do so, but invariably lapsed.
Tom was averse to regular work and preferred to get by with the help of a somewhat older friend, Bill, who lodged in the same house and was a freelance handyman living off householders wanting jobs done cheaply for cash in hand. Bill was quite knowledgeable, but had few scruples about overcharging for patchy repairs that might not last. He led a slightly more stable existence than Tom and indeed advised me that by giving Tom money at times of crisis I was not helping him to find a job. Tom was a binge drinker and went through a period of heroin abuse. He was intelligent enough to realise his addiction was getting out of control and at my instigation he applied for admission to an addiction clinic. At the last moment he decided to try to come off the drug without help, and actually succeeded in doing so gradually. In later years he admitted he was still dangerously tempted to buy a fix when feeling low, but he limited himself to cannabis, which he used persistently, almost until his death.
Tom’s marriage was an eventful episode. He and George had both stayed with me one night in Hampstead when Pietro was away. The three of us went strolling in the West End the next day. Two girls looking invitingly out of a bar window attracted Tom and George’s attention and they made swift contact while I made myself scarce. Tom became immediately infatuated with one of the girls. She was just turned twenty while he was already in his thirties. Full of good intentions to find regular work, Tom married her. No doubt pleased by this turn of events, Pietro agreed to let the couple stay in the Hampstead flat while we were away on holiday, so that they would have breathing space to look for accommodation. They had not succeeded when we were due to return and I had to put down a deposit to enable them to move into temporary lodging. Afterwards, they found a room in Earls Court, near the Boltons, Tom’s favourite pub, which was then a haunt of gays, drug users and petty criminals. Soon his wife had a baby. Tom strove to provide for them, going so far as to take part in thefts of metal from empty houses.
I helped out a little, but tried to maintain only Platonic contacts with Tom. His wife was happy with a Bohemian life with plenty of men around, which made Tom jealous. The situation worsened when she left with the baby, ostensibly to join her mother in the North, but Tom suspected it was to renew contact with a man friend there. When she returned, Tom managed to secure a job on a pig farm in the country, which gave them accommodation in a small tied cottage. I drove them there. Tom was in his element working with the pigs, but she was utterly bored and urged him to find work in town. Accordingly he left, taking with him cash stolen from the gas meter. The farmer, who knew I had brought them, gave my name to the police who visited me to find Tom’s whereabouts. I could say truthfully that I did not know, he had not contacted me. Meantime, his wife rang Pietro, tearfully complaining that Tom had deserted her and she was threatened with eviction. Of course that confirmed his worst opinion of Tom. How the situation was resolved I cannot recall, but eventually they were back together again in Earls Court, but not for long. The wife left with the infant for the last time and Tom took an overdose of barbiturates (popular as ‘downers’ among drug users in those days) waking up in hospital. He was genuinely depressed, having been devoted to his little girl as well as being in love with his wife. He never fully recovered.
Friendship with Tom continued, but he was not keen to have much sexual contact and I did not press for it. As years went by, Pietro, partly due to work commitments, was not inclined to travel abroad and I would sometimes take Tom with me. Opportunities for this occurred when attending conferences abroad, after which I would extend my stay and have Tom join me.
I tried to convince myself that I was doing good by giving Tom relief from a dreary round of poverty and unemployment and occasional dead-end jobs that never lasted, and giving him experiences he could not have had otherwise. It pleased me to watch his reactions. I recall his amazement on first landing in North Africa and his enjoyment at galloping along a beach in Tunisia on a hired horse. He had been used to horses in his youth in North Wales. He asked the owner the name of the horse and was told that it was not the custom to give their horses names. This intrigued him and the memory of the horse with no name stayed with him. He was uninhibited about contacting people and delighted when he was invited to a wedding in Turkey. His addiction to cannabis was a ready means of fraternisation with young Moroccans. My own reward was having a companion who readily participated in recruiting young Moroccans as tour guides who were happy to proffer the additional sexual services of themselves and their friends.
Tom was usually unemployed when I asked him to accompany me on trips. On one occasion when he was working he negotiated the necessary leave time. We returned on the correct date, but instead of going home to prepare for return to work, to my disappointment, he got off the train at Earls Court, went back to his old haunts, and was inevitably dismissed. I realised then that I was powerless to change his ways and might even be helping to perpetuate them.
From the mid-seventies onwards holidays with Pietro were usually spent with an affluent gay American couple from San Francisco, whom he had originally met though his lecturing work and with whom we both became firm friends. Together we took motor tours around California and neighbouring states and at times they crossed the Atlantic and we toured Europe and even Morocco together. On these occasions we were not sex tourists, we travelled as two separate couples, neither of whom were looking for sex elsewhere.
The time came when Pietro was less and less inclined to travel, partly on account of his work commitments and partly because of increasingly poor health. With his agreement I continued to visit the States and would secretly arrange for Tom to go with me. The San Francisco couple liked having Tom to make up a social foursome, and they were content to keep the arrangement secret from Pietro, but the schemes to avoid discovery were to me a continuing worry and grief. I suspect that in the end he did sometimes know or guess, but had decided not to interfere.
Tom died some years after Pietro, but they were years of sad invalidism. It was unsurprising, after a life of drinking and smoking, that he should begin to have liver and heart problems. For some time he had been complaining of chest pains and breathlessness, but his GP did not see fit to refer him for hospital examination. Then he developed a highly visible necrosis (black shrivelling) of the end of a finger, a sign of serious obstruction to the circulation of the arm. He got worse and worse and was confined to bed with weakness and breathlessness. As there was no home care, I paid for a stay in a nursing home. Seeing how ill he was, the doctor in charge sent him twice to the Accident and Emergency department of the local hospital, but twice he was returned without treatment because there was no referral letter from the GP. Tom, in desperation, discharged himself and went home in near collapse. A day or two later I went to see him to find him being carried out on a stretcher with the GP present. She said to me “You know he is very ill” – as if that had not been obvious for some time! In hospital he was in ventricular failure and had terrific oedematous swelling. With immediate skilled attention his life was saved, but he was left an invalid.
On discharge from hospital Tom was too weak to walk and quite incapable of looking after himself. Although having no authority in the matter, not being next of kin, I took it upon myself to call upon the GP to ask if she would seek social services help. Her response was “Oh, he’s got AIDS hasn’t he?” In fact he had been tested and found negative during his hospitalisation. At this point, through my work with the Mental Health Act Commission, I was able to buttonhole the chief of social services and pass her a note describing Tom’s urgent needs. From then on he received the help he needed. I suspect the GP, an Asian lady, had some moral antipathy to dealing with a self-confessed former drug abuser. Incidentally, this same GP had had Bill, Tom’s friend and fellow lodger, as her patient. After a long period of complaining of chest pains and coughing, when she finally referred him to hospital his cancer was visible in a protruding rib tumour and he survived only a matter of weeks.
In the years following, Tom was given suitable local authority accommodation and was able to live independently, aided by a motorised chair. One of the social workers became more of a friend than a professional, running errands and chatting with him beyond the call of duty. His new GP was sympathetic and not troubled by Tom’s former life style. I was able to make periodic visits and supply small comforts. Through some neighbouring contact he was able to obtain cannabis, which significantly eased his suffering. Unfortunately, with so much liver and cardiac damage, there followed an inevitable decline. I was obliged to take a pet dog he had acquired to an animal refuge when he could no longer cope with it. He had emergency admissions to hospital on several occasions, receiving impersonal attention for immediate problems, but returning no better. His final admission was to a different hospital where he received two months of terminal care. The nurses were attentive and friendly, his stay was tranquil and he enjoyed being visited. I saw him shortly before he died, but missed the actual last breath by an hour or so. His face looked haggard but relaxed.
Tom had persistently refused to try to contact his wife, saying he hoped she and the child were in better circumstances than he could provide. During his initial hospital admission, when he was critically ill, I telephoned his mother. She seemed sceptical about my news and never visited and he made no further contact. I had met her and felt I should tell her of his death, but her phone was no longer in operation. There being no known next of kin the local authority arranged a funeral service attended only by myself and one old friend of Tom’s who drove 250 miles to be there.
Both George and Tom, but especially the latter, had some sad experiences with the National Health Service. Unattractive or difficult characters, with nobody to agitate on their behalf, are at risk of failing to get all they need. However, along the way both encountered within the bureaucratic system some professionals who managed to add the humane touch that makes all the difference.
One other more disastrous liaison deserves to be confessed. The doctor who introduced me to Tangier also introduced a Moroccan that he thought more reliable than most sex workers. Mohammed was a well-built young man in his early twenties, moderately fluent in English, French and Spanish. He often helped young friends to write begging letters to foreigners who had patronised them during visits to Morocco. He liked to bring friends along so we could both enjoy their sexual services. He presented himself as someone who did not ask for anything but was pleased to receive whatever gifts I might offer. He was a useful interpreter and companion on tours into the countryside, but he was not a licensed guide and we were liable to be questioned by police as to his reason for accompanying us.
I fell for Mohammed in a big way. Like most of his kind his ambition was to be offered work abroad, without which he was not permitted to have a passport. I planned to rescue him from unemployment and prostitution by applying for a permit to bring him to England to work for us as a servant. Pietro agreed to this improbable scenario and it was understood that sexual relations with Mohammed would cease. From the moment he arrived troubles began. As soon as we gave him tasks to do he was anything but enthusiastic. It was clear that he had expected to continue his role as a holiday companion. Realising he was excluded from our intimate relationship he became extremely jealous and sulky. Other oddities emerged. He expressed a pressing need for religious observance, so I took him to a nearby mosque, but he attended only once. He also professed an abhorrence of women, but while we were away and had left him in the Milton cottage, Mrs Smith, our loyal home help, was embarrassed to find him sleeping with the local publican’s wife. The doctor who had introduced Mohammed found him alternative employment with a gay British lawyer who had known him on visits to Morocco and thought he would be an asset. That plan did not work out either, for Mohammed became jealous of the lawyer’s partner and spent much of his time sulking and idling instead of working. After some further failures his work permit was withdrawn and he had to return to Morocco.
That should have been the end, but I continued to hear from him as he soon wanted to return. When we acquired the tiny Sidi Hosni house we let him use it when we were not there and paid him a little to look after it. He resumed his role as a guide during holidays and was particularly co-operative on an occasion when I visited with Tom and our American friends in Pietro’s absence. Predictably, as I now realise, the arrangement did not work out in the long run. His drinking was out of control at times and he got into trouble with the police. Far from seeing to things like blocked drains or a leaking roof, he would let problems accumulate till we arrived and spent our holidays dealing with them. He would also cram relatives into the house, who had to be sent away when we arrived. More seriously, neighbours complained about drinking parties on the roof when we were not there.
I still sympathised with Mohammed’s unhappy state of chronic unemployment and general dissatisfaction with life, but the situation with the house was becoming more troublesome than it was worth. We decided, as a generous good-bye gesture, to give him the house in the hope that he might make use of it by letting it to tourists. I had thought this would entail nothing more than signing it over, but Moroccan bureaucracy saw to it that the transaction cost more than the original purchase. Sadly, it was not long before Mohammed was caught smuggling cigarettes and had to surrender the house to avoid imprisonment.
I kept in touch with Mohammed intermittently. He married and produced several children. The family stayed in poverty due to his drinking and continued dependence on pandering to tourists, which became less profitable with the disappearance of his physical attractiveness. He now professed a moralistic attitude, declaring that he would never let his boys go through the dreadful life he had had to lead. To that end he would not allow them to watch TV because of its sexual content. He had apparently forgotten how much he once enjoyed homosexual freedom. He brought along two sons to meet me. The younger, not old enough to appreciate the situation, was happy to talk and accept small gifts, but the elder could barely bring himself to utter a civil word.
After a long interval, I revisited Morocco with my current partner and unwisely asked Mohammed to accompany us. His disgruntled demeanour and demands for money become unbearable and, for the first time, we parted in anger and although I have heard from him since contact has not been resumed.
Pietro always protested that he never had a sexual liaison elsewhere after meeting me, but that was not quite true. In the early Sixties he formed a close attachment to a musician who lived nearby. I raised no objection and in fact became friendly with the musician, who consented to give a piano recital at a party in my college in Cambridge. George attended, but he was moody and awkward and caused some embarrassment. I was hoping that Pietro’s new friendship might lead to tolerance of my own behaviour, but that was not to be. The three of us went on a holiday quite happily together to Morocco, but, tragically, that was the end of the affair. The musician had to leave for Switzerland to recruit a singer for an opera he was directing. En route back to England he was stricken with an ascending polyneuritis and became paralysed. When we got back he was in hospital on a respirator, unable to communicate save for eye signals. After a week or two in this awful state he died. His family, recognising the closeness of the attachment, placed Pietro with them in the leading car of the funeral cortege. I have often wondered whether our lives might have been happier if this friend had survived and Pietro had gone to live with him. After Pietro’s death I learned of flirtations he had with adult students, long after sex between us had ceased. I was relieved rather than hurt to discover that, in spite of his claim to the moral high ground, he could sometimes relax his principles.
One’s own woes are apt to seem special, but in reality gay male relationships are often beset by the eternal conflict between the masculine drive towards variety and novelty in sexual experiences, popularly attributed to the innate requirements of the ‘selfish gene’, and the opposing ideal of absolute sexual fidelity. In the heyday of the gay liberation movement, it was often argued that gays had no business aping the rules of capitalist society that keep heterosexuals anchored to their nuclear families and ready victims to wage slavery. Free love was thought natural for gays, who did not necessarily want to live in couples or take on child-rearing responsibilities. The advent of AIDS and the dire risks attendant on indiscriminate promiscuity, and later the introduction of civil partnerships, with same sex couples acknowledging their responsibilities towards each other, it has become politically correct to emphasise the loving and faithful qualities of many gay relationships. Of course, there is no ‘one fits all’ recipe for happiness, but reflecting on couples I have known, I believe that a stable relationship in which partners can rely on each other for company, support and affection in a life organised together is highly desirable. I believe also that the mutually accepted availability of outside sexual contacts, the so-called open marriage, works well for many gay men, although this seems less important to lesbians. There is always a risk of an outside relationship that sets out as casual becoming so intense it causes a break-up of the partnership. In the heterosexual world marital infidelity often leads to a chronic wife plus mistress situation that ends either in divorce and disaster for the children or the dumping of an exploited mistress. The dissolution of a gay partnership, where children are not involved and each member has equal earning power, is arguably less traumatic than heterosexual divorce. The worst possible outcome, it seems to me, is chronic misery when neither party conforms to the other’s image of what a partnership should be.
After starting work in Cambridge in 1960, the antiques shop carried on as before. Helped by the Institute opening a research office in Camberwell, I was able to spend some time during the week in London and, as soon as I acquired the cottage in Milton, Pietro would spend weekends with me in Cambridge. This meant much journeying to and fro. The shop business had always been an occupation rather than a truly profitable concern. I kept the account books and the miserly sum theoretically allocated to Pietro was not a living wage. This was no matter so long as we were living communally, but circumstances were changing. We were employing as a shop assistant, at a very modest wage, Mary, a New Zealand lady with a liking for ceramics. She became a close friend to us. Pietro conceived the idea of opening a branch of the business in Cambridge, where Mary had relatives, and making her a business partner. In Little Abington, near Cambridge, there was for sale an historic mediaeval building, Jeremiah’s Cottage, with legendary links with an historic highwayman of that name. It had been a pub and had a large garden attached. There was obvious potential for a country antiques centre. It was agreed that my nominal interest in the business would cease and, with the help of a loan from me, Mary would buy Jeremiah’s Cottage, make it her home and accommodate within it a branch of the antiques shop.
Pietro had no experience of business finance and, despite his sometimes brusque mannerisms, no assertiveness in relations with women. Mary, a convent-reared devout Catholic, was shocked when we told her we had been to see the Orton play Entertaining Mr Sloane. Somehow she managed to ignore, or not see, that we were gay. She had strong ideas about borrowing (except borrowing to purchase a home) and disliked the fact that the business was run on a small overdraft that I had previously guaranteed. She insisted on selling off stock until the overdraft was eliminated, which severely restricted further purchases. Moreover, having acquired a potentially attractive garden, and being the keen gardener that she was, the shop got less attention than Pietro had envisaged and visiting dealers received less hospitality. The business went swiftly downhill and had to close. Mary sold the building at profit, paid off my loan, and returned to New Zealand. We sold off the stock and rented out the shop space in London. Pietro would have loved to be a collector rather than a dealer and we took the opportunity of the sell-out to hoard a few things for ourselves. A decade after Pietro’s death, when the Institute of Criminology published a fiftieth anniversary commemorative book, it included a picture of me accompanied by some Staffordshire pottery figures, remnants of Pietro’s collection. I believe Mary never appreciated her contribution to the collapse of the business. She was genuinely fond of us and, years after Pietro’s death, she continued to write to me remembering our happy times working together.
A worrying time followed the closure of the antiques shop. Pietro had no job and the future looked uncertain. Luckily, through shop customer contacts, he had been asked from time to time to give lectures on ceramics and this led in time to being taken on by a private art history school that used the Victoria and Albert Museum as a venue for talks on objects displayed there. With this experience, and taking advantage of some certification obtained from the college in Italy where he had studied art history, he then secured a post as lecturer at the University of Stoke-on-Trent, working in a Department that specialised in decorative arts and was equipped with workshops where students could develop practical skills. This suited Pietro, who was adept at pottery and jewellery making and had become a registered silversmith. I still possess odd bits of his works as well as a set of glasses made by his students at Stoke in imitation of the styles of different periods.
Pietro rented a tiny cottage in the Peak District near Stoke, spending many hours driving from there to Cambridge and Hampstead so that we could spend time together. This was exhausting and was brought to an end following a minor driving accident on the way into London when he was found to be over the alcohol limit – not surprising in view of his drinking habits. With the help of a glowing reference from Stoke he obtained a lecturing post with Christie’s Education, a private art history school for adult students run by the famous auction house. Many of its students were ladies of leisure from the moneyed classes, others were training for careers in art business as curators, dealers, appraisers etc. Pietro missed his students at Stoke, but proved equally enthusiastic and not at all over-awed by either the students or the staff at Christie’s. Indeed, I heard that at an office gathering he had made some typically forthright comments to none less than Lord Carington, the Chairman.
In 1983, shortly before retirement from full time employment at the Institute of Criminology, I sold the house in Hampstead, that we had inhabited for over a quarter century, to the owner of the business that was occupying the space left by the defunct antiques shop. Together we took a lease on a basement flat in Kensington, near his new place of work, while I continued to live in Cambridge at the cottage in Milton.