Owning Up: The Trilogy (41 page)

Unlike his parents he hadn’t a trace of Scottish accent, but there was a certain precision combined with richness in his delivery which hinted at his Caledonian roots, and eliminated any possibility of a Liverpudlian background. He had, from early in his life, cultivated the friendship of artists and writers. Edith Sitwell sent him her books with warm dedications on the fly-leaves and he had a great many amusing stories to tell about his various encounters with Mrs Patrick Campbell in her later years. His house, in a Victorian suburb of Liverpool, seemed to me, as a child, the essence of sophistication. The drawing-room had a white carpet, there was a Matthew Smith still-life over the grand piano and, lounging elegantly about, beautiful young men, all of whom were creative in some way. This one played the piano, that one designed ballet sets. Outside, the sunlight itself seemed less raw, more urbane, than anywhere else in Liverpool.

David, however, believed in work. He needed money to defend his life-style and was not ashamed to earn it in commerce. To this end he had risen to become Managing Director of Bon Marché, Liverpool’s most fashionable big store. I adored Bon Marché. The ground floor smelt of scent and rich furs and here too, shopping with my mother, one was most likely to come upon Uncle David sampling the home-made chocolates, for he was, it must be admitted, extremely greedy.

Both chocolates and David Webster figured in my first grown-up homosexual experience. Early in the war, while still at Stowe, I had been asked to act the role of Lady Macbeth; it was to be directed by Professor G Wilson Knight, the distinguished, if eccentric, Shakespearean scholar who was at that time one of the strangely assorted staff. I learnt the part in the holidays and, wishing to appear one-up on my return to school, asked David if he would give me some advice. He had himself directed and played Macbeth some years before, casting my mother, who was in fact rather irritated not to have played Lady Macbeth, as the third witch. Sixteen years old and alone with David in his drawing-room…

‘I have given suck and know how sweet it is…’

‘More passion, dear. You sound as if you are opening a garden féte. Have another chocolate.’ For, despite rationing, there was a big box on the low glass table and they were proper chocolates too, each in its little crinkly nest and some of them wrapped in gold paper.

Then, when we’d finished, he kissed me on the mouth. I hadn’t really enjoyed it, but revelled in the idea of it. Since I was thirteen, I’d been making eyes at all my mother’s friends I knew to be gay and finally one of them had responded, so I ran home to tell my ten-year-old sister. I’d already sold her the glamour of homosexuality and we’d go for long walks in the parks appraising the ragamuffins in their torn jerseys. ‘How much more beautiful,’ I’d say to her, ‘is the word “boy” than the word “girl”,’ and she, flattered to receive my attention and confidences, would solemnly agree.

Now, via a wartime stint at the Ministry of Production under Sir Stafford Cripps, David had left Bon Marché for the Garden to prepare for its re-opening after its wartime metamorphosis into a dance-hall. He had moved into an impressive modern house near the BBC. The attacks on him.were both underhand – ‘the homosexual haberdasher’ was a particularly snobbish epithet – and unrealistic. He knew, after all, a great deal about opera and ballet and he had. many friends in both worlds. Furthermore, through his experience in running a big store, he had a grasp of business, of costing, of handling people in organisations, which was denied to the more obvious candidates for the job.

When I rang him.the first time, he was kindness itself and immediately asked me round for a drink. I felt able from then on to call him whenever I wanted to, while at the same time aware that it would be a mistake to presume too often. Despite Lady Macbeth and the chocolates, I was not really his type. Partially to my relief, partially bruising to my Vanity, he never made a pass at me again.

6

My real reason for not contacting the Surrealist Group immediately was that I feared – as I still fear – rejection, and reading the formal, icy attacks of André Breton on those he found inadequate or hypocritical (a style of vituperation echoed in those English pamphlets which Tony and I had pored over in Pwllheli) in no way reassured me. The thing was that I believed – and to this day still tend to believe – that everybody shares my obsessions. For example, on one of my first visits to London, I had approached a policeman in Regent Street and asked him, to his justifiable astonishment, where Freddie Mirfield and his Garbage Men were playing that night. Mr Mirfield had only made one record, a rather weak approximation to Chicago jazz, although in retrospect of some historical interest in that among the other Garbage Men was a very young clarinettist called Johnny Dankworth. It is very likely that the band was a pick-up group, certainly they never made another record, and yet I took it for granted that, because I knew about them, they would be playing every night in London at some well-known dance-hall. In the same way I visualised the Surrealists, those wizards who at any moment were about to change the world, as occupying a large headquarters hung with masterpieces, full of studios where some people painted or constructed objects and others wrote poetry of crystalline purity or issued manifestos of impeccable revolutionary fervour, and where rooms were set aside for acts of erotic delirium.

I hesitated, therefore, to ring up Simon Watson Taylor at his Flaxman number, believing that I might be found wanting immediately, denounced for wearing a uniform, or unmasked as a homosexual, a deviation I gathered Breton disapproved of because of the frivolity and aesthetic freemasonry of people like Cocteau and their tendency to exploit the more superficial aspects of Surrealism for purely fashionable ends. I didn’t admit to this reasoning, pretending to myself that it was important to wait until Tony Harris Reed could join me, and to this end wrote to him frequently to establish a date when he had both sufficient leave and sufficient money to make the journey up from Portsmouth. He answered noncommittally but the truth was that, although later on he did meet Mesens on one occasion, his enthusiasm was already waning and he had begun to apply his sardonic concentration to another of his interests – racing. Comparatively soon, we lost touch, but I met him some ears later in a pub, dressed in the loudest of checks, and earning his living as a newspaper tipster, calling himself Major in line with is profession.

In the end, therefore, I plucked up my courage and rang Simon Watson Taylor from a phone box in Chatham dockyard. He sounded polite if rather abrupt and I arranged to go to his Chelsea flat the following Saturday at midday. It was my usual custom then, if the weather was fine, to hitch-hike into London from the outskirts of Rochester. It was too unreliable a method to risk on the way back because one had to report on board at a specified time, but drivers, both commercial and civilian, were still generously disposed to picking up servicemen and it saved quite a lot of money. That day, nervous but excited, clasping my ditty box, I left the dockyard and was soon sitting high up next to an old lorry driver whose false teeth were so poor a fit you could hear them forming fours above the roar of the engine. As he had to turn off towards the docks at Blackheath he dropped me at the top of the hill that falls away towards New Cross, and I stood there looking down at the bomb-scarred city below me glittering in the winter sun. In my ditty box were a bottle of ink, a pen, a grubby towel, a sponge bag and a new poem typed on a naval typewriter on pink paper. It was called ‘The Heir’:

Naked, he makes small red tears.

A monster (with beautiful eyes and hands),

Who blames his father.

I felt like a Surrealist Dick Whittington, and a little later thumbed a lift in a car that dropped me off at Charing Cross where, after a few minutes at the stop outside the anti-vivisectionists’ headquarters, I caught a number n bus to Chelsea and rang the bell of Simon’s flat in Markham Square.

Simon was a few years older than I. He was small but neatly made, full of aggressive energy fuelled by alcohol, controlled by discipline. He was dressed in a well-cut conservative tweed suit with an expensive shirt and tie. His eyes blazed with intelligence. His hair was short, cut
en brosse
by an excellent barber. His humour was icy. I found him impressive and rather intimidating. His flat, however, was something of a disappointment. There were a few etchings by Miró and Dali but little sense of fantasy and the furniture, while comfortable, was banal in the extreme. We talked for some time and I, in my usual, parrot-like wish to make appropriate noises, declared my adherence to Surrealism in a solemn style deriving from the translations of Breton’s ornate classic French into a rather stilted English. Simon listened to me with sardonic kindness and only when, to curry favour further, I attacked homosexuality did he correct me by saying that several of the greatest Surrealists, Crevel for a start, had been queer or at any rate bi-sexual and that it was only Breton who had found it necessary to rationalise his own feelings of repulsion towards that particular deviation. The only trouble with the human body, Simon said, was that there were not enough holes in it for the exploration of human pleasure.

I must have been maddening, but it was clear after an hour that he had taken a liking to me and a friendship was established that has lasted to this day.

It seemed to me perfectly natural that after a time he should open a cupboard on whose shelves were neatly arranged, each in its cardboard cover, the most enormous and amazing collection of rare 78rpm jazz and blues records including many original Bessie Smiths. As he was a Surrealist, I thought,
of course
he’d like jazz. He declared his belief in Anarchism too, and promised to introduce me to the London Anarchist Group some of whom had only recently been released from prison for causing disaffection among the troops through their publication
Freedom.
I expressed my eagerness, but was even more excited when he suggested that I might attend the next Surrealist ‘seance’ the following Monday in a private dining room of the Barcelona Restaurant, Beak Street.

He had an appointment in the afternoon; somehow Simon’s appointments always impressed me as very portentous and serious; but first he offered me lunch and we walked along King’s Road to a rather disgusting little restaurant (even by the standards of the time) called the Bar-B-Cue where we ate Spanish omelettes under a poor mural of cowboys roping steers. I was, I must admit, in a state of delirious excitement at lunching with the secretary of the Surrealist Group in England.

In the Bar-B-Cue was an extraordinary figure, surrounded by an admiring circle of bohemians, whom we joined for coffee. ‘Mr Watson Taylor,’ said this person, ‘sit down and tell me the story of your life, and introduce me to your friend in bellbottoms.’ It was obvious to me that Simon, while heterosexual himself, knew this man. I had made a considerable tactical error in assuming that all the Surrealists shared Breton’s mistrust of deviation. His name was Quentin Crisp and he was then I should guess in his middle thirties. Being in Chelsea he was unshaven and rather grubby, the nail varnish on both finger and toe nails, the latter peeping through gilt sandals, cracked and flaked, his mascara in need of attention, his lipstick of renewal. He had, however, a wistful, frail beauty and a wicked wit. His hair was henna red, a common enough sight now but unseen then on ostensibly male heads. I thought him extraordinary and suspected – rightly so as it turned out – that he must have the courage of a lioness to walk the streets of London. Indeed, he was frequently insulted, sometimes assaulted and now and then was in trouble with the law who objected, not to any overt act, for there he was very discreet, but to his appearance in general.

My equation of Chelsea with grubbiness may seem too broad a generalisation, but it was exact in relation to Quentin. He lived in an amazingly squalid room somewhere off King’s Road and in the quarter saw no reason to do more than slap cosmetics over the grime. When visiting North Soho, however, his other habitat, he was always clean and chic, first bathing in a friend’s flat – for he had no running water of his own – and then applying his make-up with impeccable art. We became friends instantly (I’m not denying that the sailor suit may have been something of a turn-on), and when Simon left for his appointment, Quentin suggested we went to the cinema to see ‘one of Miss Hayworth’s films’. And so we did, arousing many a curious glance. Later, like Quentin, I too added the Bohemian cafes and pubs of Charlotte Street to the diverse worlds available to me on leave, but for the moment I thanked him for taking me to the pictures and took a bus to South Kensington to visit an old school friend of mine called Robin Westgate, a Lieutenant in the Guards. We had a nice dinner and I stayed the night in his parents’ sparsely furnished London flat, but there was hardly a moment when I wasn’t thinking about my meeting with the Surrealists the following Monday.

I was actually meant to be on watch that day, but so adaptable was life aboard the
Argus
that I was able to come to an arrangement with my ‘oppo’; he was carrying on with a married lady in Gilling-ham whose husband worked nights on Tuesday so it suited him very well.

I went up to London around noon and spent some hours in the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at original Lautrec posters in the Print Room. I forget who’d told me about the Print Room but it was open to the public and they brought you whatever you wanted to examine. This fulfilled several functions in my London life at that moment. Firstly it was free so it was a way of staying warm and interested during the day and saving the evenings, as I had done in Wetherby, for drinking and, with luck, debauchery. Secondly, I could examine, in the original, the work of artists who interested me, and linked to that, but rather shamingly, I was aware of the effect of a sailor ,in bellbottoms asking for comparatively esoteric artefacts, thereby astonishing and pleasing the librarians and the elderly scholars. ‘So you’re a Tiepolo fan too,’ one of them had said on a previous visit. The Lautrecs, however, were not such a good idea. What I hadn’t realised was that some of the posters, which I’d known only in postcard reproductions or in the meagre little books of the period, were very large and I had to have the librarian’s help in spreading them out, thereby incommoding the gentlemen examining Persian miniatures or Fuseli drawings, forcing them to move, grumbling, into the corners of the room.