Gloria held the assistant pet-food saleswomanship in, handily, a Shepherds Bush emporium. I walked her there, then came back up the Bayswater Road to the Tutors, which was barely half a mile from Campden Hill Square.
Mrs Noreen Tauber, B.A. (Aberdeen), went on to bore me some more about dates and things. Then, with a frowsy sigh, she offered to take me on a tour of the school, probably with nothing more ambitious in mind than to show me that it wasn’t a workhouse or blacking-factory after all, We walked up a corridor, admired two identical classrooms, and walked back down it again, over wobbly parquet, past farting radiators. The pace was relaxed, donnish; the conversation general, discursive; we tried, in our small way, to make the place seem nicer than it was.
Legless buskers cavorted outside Holland Park Underground. I bought some newspapers (Fleet Street’s big two, in fact, the Sun and the Mirror), leftily dropped ten pence into the musicians’ bowler hat and stood there reading the headlines, tapping my foot to a trilled-up version of ‘Oh, You Beautiful Doll’. I was about to aim up to Notting Hill for a coffee at the Costa Brava when a hook-nosed queen with flat hair appeared from behind the curtains of the station photograph booth. He asked if I knew the time. I said what it was, referring him to the large clock attached to the wall opposite. He thanked me and inquired if I ever went down the Catacombs club in Earls Court.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, flattered.
It was being a good September, quite warm in the sun, so I took my time, glancing through the papers, occasionally halting mid-stride to mull over a joke or the better to marvel at a pin-up.
I was a queer, too, once upon a time.
The point is worth elaborating.
For possibly the most glamorous thing about me is that I am, actually, a delicate child – or as near to one as you can well get nowadays.
I got bronchitis – absolutely spontaneously – at the age of thirteen.
The night after it was diagnosed I crept down and looked it up in the encyclopedia. There it was, ‘acute bronchitis’, which was what the doctor said I had. Better still, though, was ‘chronic’ bronchitis: you got that at least once a year. I asked old Cyril Miller, our GP, whether there was any chance that I might develop, or acquire, the chronic kind. Praising recent scientific breakthroughs and modern drug techniques, he said this was unlikely. Chronic bronco was reserved for nicotined oldsters with suede-shoe lungs.
Yet, if you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it’s amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.
Besides, there were plenty of other things to keep me going. Take, for example, my mouth – literally a shambles. My milk-teeth wouldn’t go away, they just curdled, although politely moving over to accommodate my grown-up ones. At the age of ten I must have had more teeth in my head than the average dentist’s waiting-room. Soon, I used to think, they’ll be coming out of my nose. Then months of high-powered surgery involving metal strips, nuts, clips, bolts … you name it. For two years I went about the place with a mouth like a Meccano set.
The diseases you’re supposed to get only once I got twice. My bones were the consistency of fresh marzipan. I nurtured seasonal asthma.
Patently, it was all right by me. Dozy afternoons slugging on opiate cough mixtures, sleeping-draughts dropped at noon, stolen handfuls of Valium, a sheet of aspirins before breakfast. I read every readable book in the house, and also most of the unreadable ones. I wrote two epic poems: an heroicall romance in twenty-four cantos entitled The Tryst’ (© 1968), and an asthmatic, six-thousand-line Waste Land called ‘Only the Serpent Smiles’ (© 1970), some parts of which reappear in the aforementioned ‘Adolescent Monologue’ sonnet sequence. I wrote cameos of everyone I had ever met. I recorded all I saw, felt, thought. I had myself a time.
About my queer period.