We were a small family with very little money, but nevertheless we had a maid in a black uniform with a starched cap and apron who served meals and stood behind us in the dining room while we ate. This, of course, was nonsensical.

  The failure of my parents’ ill-conceived marriage was plain: my mother was extravagant and my father was penniless. It’s not a good combination. The fault wasn’t solely my mother’s though because my father never told her how much he earned. She just knew he was a lawyer and assumed they were set for life. She didn’t much like living in Sutton and must have said to him, “Why can’t we move to a bigger house in the country?” He probably replied that they couldn’t afford it, which doubtless she wouldn’t have believed. It’s true my father was a lawyer, but unfortunately for my mother he was a bad one.

  I now know for a fact that he was penniless because my mother’s sister told me that bailiffs once visited my parents’ earlier house in Carshalton, the town in which they lived before I was born. Back then they only had a son and a daughter. So quite what they were thinking when they were penniless and had two extra children, I can’t imagine. I think that’s why my father hated me so. I was another expense he could ill afford.

  In spite of the fact we couldn’t afford them, I loved the servants who worked for us, principally because they paid attention to me and praised me. I could dance before them and act for them and tell them long, elaborate stories. They watched and listened, not because I was necessarily any good, but because it meant they could take a break from dusting the stairs or whatever else it was they were doing. My mother would have preferred that they went on sweeping the stairs. She firmly believed in the separation of the classes.

  Growing up then, I was actually one of four children. I had two brothers and a sister. While parents sometimes talk of the joy brought to them by their offspring, I can’t help but think we were a terrible burden on my mother. My sister might have been of some use to her, but my brothers and I all went on in the way young Englishmen do. We got up and shouted, “Mother. Where are my socks?” And she would say, “Where they always are. In the sock drawer.” And, of course, we couldn’t find them, so she would have to come upstairs and find a pair of socks and give them to us. We never did anything for ourselves. We must have worn her ragged. I think that’s why she insisted on a maid.

  As a child, my parents celebrated my birthday, which is on Christmas Day, by giving me two presents. I think only the immediate family gave me two presents. Strangers and other people simply gave me one ‘combined’ present for Christmas and my birthday, an act that would always make me feel shortchanged. My mother would wrap up my presents and write tags that said ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ which was her way of acknowledging the difference.

  I am told that in America for your birthday you get spanked the number of your birthday years. So I imagine Americans must dread having birthdays. Nothing like that ever happened to me. In fact, though my childhood was miserable, I was never ill-treated in any way. I have to emphasize that or risk you thinking my parents were ogres. They weren’t. They just struggled to cope with me.

  I can remember one day when we were all sitting down to a meal. My mother was cutting up the dog’s food when suddenly she burst into tears. We were horrified. My eldest brother got up from the table and fetched her a glass of water after which she was alright. Then, being English, we all went on as though nothing had happened. At the time I thought, “Why did she do that?” But, of course, she was just really worn out.

  When I was young, my mother mattered most in my life. She was always there, she tried to understand me and would, alternately, protect me from the world and try and adapt me to it. She never really succeeded at either.

  I remember her once sending me to a fancy dress party dressed as a girl. She must have understood that was how I wanted to go and given in. I must have been about seven or eight at the time. I also remember her permitting me to appear in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream40 dressed as a fairy. To my mind, she knew my desire was to triumph as a woman.

  As I grew older, I think she regretted these decisions. Her new tactic was instead to try to toughen me up so that I could live in the ‘real world’. She wasn’t concerned at all with what those of faith might consider ‘my sin’. No, she was concerned with my unemployability. What was I going to do to earn a living?

  Of course when I reached adulthood, I reached the conclusion that there was really nothing I could do to earn a living. So I wrote and illustrated books, I taught tap dancing and I was a model for various art schools. I had no talent for any of those things, but what else could I do? I did them well enough to sustain myself and somehow I survived. At the peak of my working life I think I earned four pounds a week. Whenever I spoke with my mother, up until the day she died, she would always say the same thing. It might have even been the last thing she ever said to me, “Are you still out of work?”

  By contrast, I don’t ever remember chatting with my father. My father seldom, if ever, spoke. He would say things and you would reply, but it wasn’t what you could call a conversation. He never told you what his thoughts were about anything. My mother made fun of him in a mild way and, I suppose, we learned to do the same.

  My father was a red-haired, nearly bald, very plain man of medium height and medium build. If you saw him in a crowd going to work, he would have looked just like everyone else. My father never talked to my mother. I never remember a discussion between them or an exchange of jokes or anything that you might call human. He would address or remark to her and she would reply. That was it. Although I was, naturally, a disappointment to my father, he went on as though nothing unpleasant had happened and disregarded me.

  I can remember not being able to go back to school because my father wouldn’t pay my school fees. It was what Americans would call a private school, but which the English erroneously refer to as a public school. All the boys went on to be doctors and lawyers. I had earned a small scholarship which made the fees slightly less than they otherwise would have been, but I’m sure my father thought, “Why should I pay for this wretched rat to go to school?”

  When I was at school, I was taught subjects which even at the time, I thought were of questionable use. For example, I knew the names of all the currents in the Pacific Ocean. I’ve never used the information. I think they simply taught you things to stimulate your capacity to learn.

  Classes typically consisted of about twenty-five boys. Some masters could keep the class quiet while others were never able to assert control. I should think they very quietly got the sack in the end. Some masters were quite liked, but mostly you didn’t like them and they didn’t seem to like you.

  Everything I did at school caused comment. Even the boys who liked me would ask, “Do you have to stand like that? Put your hands down.” They tried teaching me to be a schoolboy, but I never learned. It wasn’t natural to me and I suffered as a result. Had I gone to a girls’ school, I wouldn’t have suffered at all. That would have been wonderful.

  But I digress.

  I never explicitly mentioned my homosexuality to my mother and she never mentioned it to me. Nevertheless is was apparent to her and everyone else in our family. I know my mother would have done anything to have avoided the ‘terrible trouble’ that was me: the anger of my father; the hatred of my brothers and my sister; and all the weeping and wailing that went on simply because I was gay.

  Although my mother and father hated each other, they never raised their voices at one another. Moreover, in spite of her predicament, I don’t think my mother wished her life were vastly different from what it was. Towards the end of her life with my father having died many years previous, my mother admitted, “I don’t know why I married your father. I never loved him. In fact, I hated him.”

  To which I replied, “We all hated him, Mother. You just hated him enough to marry him.”

  My mother seemed to like and agree with this explanation, that her marrying him was just some elaborate form of revenge for wrongdoing early in their courtship.

  In contrast to me, both of my brothers went on to have long, successful careers. One of them worked as an accountant for a large petroleum company and travelled for a time to China on business. The other worked for a telecommunications company in South America for thirty years and ended up living in Chile.

  Now, while it may be true that artists adopt flamboyant appearances, it’s also true that people who ‘just look funny’ get stuck in the arts and that’s principally what happened to me. I looked then much as I look now, though perhaps not as exaggerated as I now look. My hair was probably dyed red and was long by the standards of the day. Nowadays, when your hair can be down to your waist, it isn’t considered long, but in those days no decent man had any hair showing lower than his hat.

  The attitude towards gay people has also changed from when I was young. People have come to accept them. Back then, they didn’t really think they existed. They thought they were sort of very far-fetched people who adopted a homosexual lifestyle in order to attract attention. My sister used to say of me, “Oh, he just wants to be different.” I didn’t. I wanted to be the same. I just happened to be different.

  These days I’m less worried by what is said of me or to me or how I’m treated and I’m less shrill when speaking about homosexuality. My increased age is entirely the cause of this. Now that I’m older, people know my sex life is non-existent. Consequently, I’m no ‘danger’ to anyone. This has enabled me to embrace ‘the profession of being’ in my twilight years, the only profession to which I have ever really been suited.

  My sister succeeded in marrying a clergyman, which I now realize was something she had always longed to do, though not, I don’t think, for reasons of faith. When we lived in Sutton, we used to make fun of her and say she was in love with the local vicar because on Sunday mornings she would go down to the local church and arrange the flowers and clean the brass.

  Her ambition to enter parochial life was not helped by her lack of physical beauty. My sister was not at all pretty. Though one of my brothers had, like her, inherited red hair from my father, both of my brothers were fairly good-looking. My hair, like my other brother’s, was the color of a mouse. In spite of this disadvantage however, my sister managed to bag her vicar and the two of them went to live in a country parish in Devonshire.

  To my mind my parents were what I would call Anglo-Catholics, which is Catholicism mixed with water. My parents went to church and dragged us with them, but even as a child I knew it was more of a social occasion than an act of worship. My parents made sure we were all dressed up before we went. Once at church, I would sit there silently waiting for the service to end. We never talked about God. Had I ever said to my parents, “Do you believe in God?” I’m sure they would have been shocked.

  Undoubtedly they would have replied, “Of course we do.”

  But really the whole thing seemed to me to be a show.

  These days religion has no hold over me at all. When I was young, I did believe in God and I thought he might jump out from a tree at any moment and chastise me for whatever it was I was doing at the time. So, I was haunted by the idea of this watchful but unsympathetic god. By the time I was fourteen however, I had more or less given up on the whole idea.

  I think I prayed as a child. I think I knelt down beside my bed and put my hands together and said, “God bless Mother and Father,” and so on. I don’t think I really believed in what I was doing. I think I did it because I believed my parents would be shocked if I didn’t. It wasn’t because God might be angry with me.

  Telling you all about my family is important because when I was young my family was almost all the people that I knew well. We didn’t really have another family near at hand into whose house we ran in and out of. Our family was quite separate from the others that lived around us, not that we were a close knit family by any means. I think that’s the shame of suburban life in England. You live in your house and you occasionally invite people in, but you put on a show for them when they do. You want them to see you at your best. You never show them the way it really is.

  When my father died, my mother went to live with my sister and her clergyman. No one thought this was a good idea, but where else could she live? Although my sister claimed she never had a row with her, I know my mother complained about everything and, of course, my sister’s life was ruined by her presence.

  She could never go away for more than four hours at a time without going back to deal with my mother. My mother was more or less confined to her bed because of rheumatism and if she ever left she had to be lifted out and put into a wheelchair. It was a terrible penance, both for her, my sister and my brother-in-law, but they managed and that’s how their lives passed. It would have been pure hell had Mother moved in with me, but by that time I had left home and was living in London. Then, of course, the war came so she wouldn’t have been able to live with me anyway.

  Had my mother not complained about everything in life, she would not have been herself. By the time she died, her hands were frozen in the position for holding canasta cards, much like my own left hand is now. I do not miss my mother because I have now lived without her for so long. She was buried in the churchyard of my brother-in-law’s parish. My father was buried in the same place. He died when I was only twenty-two.

  Now, of course, my immediate family are all dead: my mother, father, sister and my two brothers. Although I was the youngest child of my mother’s brood, I have also lived the longest. It’s almost as if You-Know-Who has blessed me with longevity to make up for the suffering of my early life. Though of course he didn’t bless any of them with long life for having to suffer me.

  Is my bloodline about to run out then? Well, yes and no. I may not have multiplied as our supposed creator instructed, but all three of my siblings did. The result is that I now have three nieces whose attitudes towards my notoriety are vastly different from those of my brothers and sister. Whereas my siblings were embarrassed, my nieces, my great-nephews and great-niece regard the whole thing as a bit of a joke.

  When I went to Cheltenham, a very respectable country town in Gloucestershire, to visit my English niece, to my surprise she had invited all of her neighbors in and thrown a bit of a surprise party in my honor. As we entered her living room, her first with me following behind, she announced, “This, believe it or not, is my uncle.” and everyone roared with laughter and smiled, which was nice.

  I’m lucky to now find myself in a family in which there are no terrible feuds. Or at least none that I am aware of. Others are always recounting stories that begin, “My Aunt Esmeralda shut herself in a room for thirty years and wouldn’t speak to anybody,” but none of that has ever happened to me. My nieces all get on with one another. Mind you, that could be because they don’t see awfully much of each other. Instead of living in each other’s pockets, they write to each other from their respective corners of the world. Maybe that’s the secret.

  * * *

  38 James Dewey Watson, American molecular biologist and geneticist, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, b. 1928

  39 Francis Harry Compton Crick, British molecular biologist and biophysicist, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, 1916-2004

  40 A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

  CHAPTER 6

  Being a Tramp

  Although these days my legs can barely carry me to the end of the street, when I was young I walked everywhere. In fact, I once walked from Pentonville, north London, all the way to Berwick, Scotland, in ten days covering a distance of around three hundred and fifty miles. Looking back, I believe this was a formative event that helped shape my attitude toward the outside world. Which is why I thought I would include it in this book.

  It was the beginning of World War II and I must have been about thirty-one or thirty-two years old. A woman who lived in the same house as me in Chelsea had gotten a job in the Women’s Land Army, an organization peculiar to England that sought to make use of female labor at home while the country’s men went off to fight the Germans.

  Women that got jobs in the Land Army typically ended up working on farms growing, I suppose, food that the soldiers and the rest of the wartime nation could eat. My friend had secured a job on a farm in Scotland, but had then complained to me, “I don’t want to take a train there, but I don’t want to walk there either. Were I to walk, I would surely be raped by a battalion of Canadian soldiers in a field.”

  Reassuringly I promised I would come with her to protect her. “Fear not,” I said, “I will accompany you so that, should we come across a battalion of Canadian soldiers in a field, they will have to rape both of us.”

  My friend agreed, so the two of us walked heel and toe from dawn until dusk for ten days without ever stopping, apart from sleeping. When we slept we stayed in people’s barns and slept on the ground or straw. We never washed since we had no access to running water. We effectively became tramps which is a Britishism that translates into American as ‘hobos’. It was an eye-opening experience.

  We walked up the Great North Road forever, from pretty much the beginning until the very end. We walked about thirty-five miles a day, each of us carrying our packs on our backs. We passed through Hatfield, Stevenage, Huntingdon, Peterborough, Grantham and Retford before we arrived in Doncaster.

  We got a lift from a lorry driver in Doncaster who took us about seventy miles through Yorkshire to Darlington. Our feet were blistered and aching by this time. We both rode up in the front with him. I can’t remember what he looked like, but I can remember him being keen that we talk to him. Lorry drivers seem to take in hitchhikers because they keep them awake. When you accept a lift with a lorry driver he says, “Speak to me.” and you talk to keep him awake because if you don’t and he falls asleep, the lorry flies off the road and everyone inside dies.