Edge of Eternity (79 page)

The usher said: “Good afternoon, m'lady.”

Grandmam Ethel, Baroness Leckwith, had lung cancer. She was taking powerful drugs to control the pain, but her mind was clear. She could still walk a little way, though she quickly became breathless.
She had every reason to retire from active politics. But today the Lords were discussing the Sexual Offences Bill 1967.

Ethel felt strongly about this partly because of her gay friend Robert. To Dave's surprise his father, whom Dave considered an old stick-in-the-mud, was also passionately in favor of reforming the law. Apparently Lloyd had witnessed the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and had never forgotten it, although he refused to discuss the details.

Ethel would not speak in the debate—she was too ill for that—but she was determined to vote. And when Eth Leckwith was determined, there was no stopping her.

Dave pushed her along the entrance hall, which was a cloakroom, each coat hook having a pink ribbon loop on which members were supposed to hang their swords. The House of Lords did not even pretend to move with the times.

It was a crime in Britain for a man to have sex with another man, and every year hundreds of men who did so were prosecuted, jailed, and—worst of all—humiliated in the newspapers. The bill under discussion today would legalize homosexual acts by consenting adults in private.

The issue was controversial, and the bill was unpopular with much of the general public; but the tide was running in favor of reform. The Church of England had decided not to oppose a change in the law. They still said homosexuality was a sin, but they agreed it should not be a crime. The bill had a good chance, but its supporters feared a last-minute backlash—hence Ethel's determination to vote.

Ethel asked Dave: “Why are you so keen to be the one who takes me to this debate? You've never shown much interest in politics.”

“Our drummer, Lew, is gay,” Dave said, using the American word. “I was with him once in a pub called the Golden Horn when the police raided it. I was so disgusted with the way the cops behaved that I've been looking, ever since, for a way to show that I'm on the side of the homosexuals.”

“Good for you,” Ethel said; then she added, with the waspishness characteristic of her later years: “I'm glad to see that the crusading spirit of your forebears hasn't been entirely obliterated by rock and roll.”

Plum Nellie were more successful than ever. They had released a
“concept album” called
For Your Pleasure Tonight
that pretended to be a recording of a show featuring groups of different kinds: old-time music hall, folk, blues, swing, gospel, Motown—all in fact Plum Nellie. It was selling millions all over the world.

A policeman helped Dave carry the wheelchair up a flight of steps. Dave thanked him, wondering whether he had ever raided a gay pub. They reached the Peers' Lobby and Dave wheeled Ethel as far as the threshold of the debating chamber.

Ethel had planned this and got the agreement of the leader of the Lords to her appearing in her wheelchair. But Dave himself was not allowed to push her into the chamber, so they waited for one of her friends to notice her and take over.

The debate was already under way, with the peers sitting on red leather benches either side of a room whose decorations seemed ludicrously rich, like a palace in a Disney movie.

A peer was speaking, and Dave listened. “The bill is a queers' charter and will encourage that most loathsome creature, the male prostitute,” the man said pompously. “It will increase the temptations that lie in the path of adolescents.” That was strange, Dave thought. Did this guy believe that all men were queer, but most simply resisted temptation? “It is not that I lack compassion for the unfortunate homosexual—I am also not lacking in compassion for those who are dragged into his net.”

Dragged into his net? What a lot of rubbish, Dave thought.

A man got up from the Labour side and took the handles of Ethel's wheelchair. Dave left the chamber and went up a staircase to the spectators' gallery.

When he got there another peer was speaking. “In one of the more popular Sunday newspapers last week there appeared an account, which some of Your Lordships may have seen, of a homosexual wedding in a Continental country.” Dave had read this story in the
News of the World.
“I think the newspaper concerned is to be congratulated on highlighting this very nasty happening.” How could a wedding be a nasty happening? “I only hope that, if this bill becomes law, the most vigilant eye will be kept on practices of this kind. I do not think these things could happen in this country, but it is possible.”

Dave thought: Where do they dig up these dinosaurs?

Fortunately not all the peers were this bad. A formidable-looking woman with silver hair got up. Dave had met her at his mother's house: her name was Dora Gaitskell. She said: “As a society, we gloss over many perversions between men and women in private. The law, and society, are very tolerant towards these and turn a blind eye.” Dave was astonished. What did she know about perversions between men and women? “Those men who are born, conditioned, or tempted irrevocably into homosexuality should have extended to them the same degree of tolerance as is extended to any other so-called perversion between men and women.” Good for you, Dora, thought Dave.

But Dave's favorite was another white-haired old woman, this one with a twinkle in her eye. She, too, had been a guest at the house in Great Peter Street: her name was Barbara Wootton. After one of the men had gone on at great length about sodomy, she struck a note of irony. “I ask myself: What are the opponents of this bill afraid of?” she said. “They cannot be afraid that disgusting practices will be thrown upon their attention, because these acts are legalized only if they are performed in private. They cannot be afraid that there will be a corruption of youth, because these acts will be legalized only if they are performed by consenting adults. I can only suppose that the opponents of the bill will be afraid that their imagination will be tormented by visions of what will be going on elsewhere.” The clear implication was that men who tried to keep homosexuality criminal did so as a way of policing their own fantasy life, and Dave laughed out loud—and was quickly told to keep quiet by an usher.

The vote was taken at half past six. It seemed to Dave that more people had spoken against than for the bill. The process of voting took an inordinately long time. Instead of putting slips of paper in a box, or pressing buttons, the peers had to get up and leave the chamber, passing through one of two lobbies, for either the “Contents” or the “Not Contents.” Ethel's wheelchair was pushed into the “Content” lobby by another peer.

The bill was passed by one hundred eleven votes to forty-eight. Dave wanted to cheer, but it would have seemed wrong, like applauding in church.

Dave met Ethel at the entrance to the chamber and took over the
wheelchair from one of her friends. She looked triumphant but exhausted, and he could not help wondering how long she had to live.

What a life she had had, he thought as he pushed her through the ornate corridors toward the exit. His own transformation from class dunce to pop star was nothing by comparison with her journey, from a two-bedroom cottage beside the slag heap in Aberowen all the way to the gilded debating chamber of the House of Lords. And she had transformed her country as well as herself. She had fought and won political battles—for votes for women, for welfare, for free health care, for girls' education, and now freedom for the persecuted minority of homosexual men. Dave had written songs that were loved around the world, but that seemed nothing compared with what his grandmother had achieved.

An elderly man walking with two canes stopped them in a paneled hallway. His air of decrepit elegance rang a bell, and Dave recalled seeing him once before, here in the House of Lords, on the day Ethel had become a baroness, about five years ago. The man said amiably: “Well, Ethel, I see you got your buggery bill passed. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, Fitz,” she said.

Dave remembered, now. This was Earl Fitzherbert, who had once owned a big house in Aberowen called Ty Gwyn, now the College of Further Education.

“I'm sorry to hear you've been ill, my dear,” said Fitz. He seemed fond of her.

“I won't mince words with you,” Ethel said. “I haven't got long to go. You'll probably never see me again.”

“That makes me terribly sad.” To Dave's surprise, tears rolled down the old earl's wrinkled face, and he pulled a large white handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his eyes. And now Dave recalled that the previous time he had witnessed a meeting between them he had been struck by an undercurrent of intense emotion, barely controlled.

“I'm glad I knew you, Fitz,” Ethel said, in a tone that suggested he might have assumed the opposite.

“Are you?” Fitz said. Then to Dave's astonishment he added: “I never loved anyone the way I loved you.”

“I feel the same,” she said, doubling Dave's amazement. “I can say it
now that my dear Bernie's gone. He was my soul mate, but you were something else.”

“I'm so glad.”

“I have only one regret,” Ethel said.

“I know what it is,” said Fitz. “The boy.”

“Yes. If I have a dying wish, it is that you will shake his hand.”

Dave wondered who “the boy” might be. Not himself, presumably.

The earl said: “I knew you would ask me that.”

“Please, Fitz.”

He nodded. “At my age, I ought to be able to admit when I've been wrong.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Knowing that, I can die happy.”

“I hope there's an afterlife,” he said.

“I have no idea,” said Ethel. “Good-bye, Fitz.”

The old man bent over the wheelchair, with difficulty, and kissed her lips. He pulled himself upright again and said: “Farewell, Ethel.”

Dave pushed the wheelchair away.

After a minute he said: “That was Earl Fitzherbert, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” said Ethel. “He's your grandfather.”

•   •   •

The girls were Walli's only problem.

Young, pretty, and sexy in a wholesome way that seemed to him uniquely American, they trooped through his front door in dozens, all eager to have sex with him. The fact that he was remaining faithful to his girlfriend in East Berlin seemed only to make him more desirable.

“Buy a house,” Dave had said to the members of the group. “Then, when the bubble bursts and nobody wants Plum Nellie anymore, at least you'll have somewhere to live.”

Walli was beginning to realize that Dave was very smart. Since he had set up the two companies, Nellie Records and Plum Publishing, the group were making a lot more money. Walli was still not the millionaire people thought he was, though he would be when the royalties started to come in from
For Your Pleasure Tonight.
Meanwhile, he could at last afford to buy a home of his own.

Early in 1967 he bought a bow-fronted Victorian house in San
Francisco, on Haight Street near the corner of Ashbury. In this neighborhood, property values had been blighted by a years-long battle over a proposed freeway that was never built. Low rents drew students and other young people, who created a laid-back ambience that then attracted musicians and actors. Members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane lived there. It was common to see rock stars, and Walli could walk around almost like a normal person.

The Dewars, the only people Walli knew in San Francisco, expected him to gut the house and modernize it; but he thought the old-fashioned coffered ceilings and wood paneling were cool, and he kept everything, though he had it all painted white.

He installed two luxurious bathrooms and a custom kitchen with a dishwashing machine. He shopped for a television set and a state-of-the-art record player. Otherwise he bought little normal furniture. He put rugs and cushions on the polished wood floors, mattresses and coat rails in the bedrooms. He had no chairs other than six stools of the kind used by guitarists in recording studios.

Both Cameron and Beep Dewar were students at Berkeley, the San Francisco branch of the University of California. Cam was a weirdo who dressed like a middle-aged man and was more conservative than Barry Goldwater. But Beep was cool, and she introduced Walli to her friends, some of whom lived in his neighborhood.

Walli lived here when he was not touring with the group or recording in London. While here, he spent most of his time playing the guitar. To play as apparently effortlessly as he did onstage required a high order of skill, and he never let a day go by without practising for at least a couple of hours. After that he would work on songs: trying out chords, putting together fragments of melody, struggling to decide which were wonderful and which merely tuneful.

He wrote to Karolin once a week. It was difficult to think of things to say. It seemed unkind to tell her about movies and concerts and restaurants of the kind that she could never enjoy.

With Werner's help he had arranged to send monthly payments so that Karolin could support herself and Alice. A modest allowance in a foreign currency bought a lot in East Germany.

Karolin wrote back once a month. She had learned guitar and
formed a duo with Lili. They did protest songs and circulated tapes of their music. Otherwise her life seemed empty in comparison with his own, and most of her news was about Alice.

Like most people in the neighborhood, Walli did not lock his doors. Friends and strangers wandered in and out. He kept his favorite guitars in a locked room at the top of the house: otherwise he owned little worth stealing. Once a week, a local store filled his refrigerator and food cupboard with groceries. Guests helped themselves, and when the food ran out Walli went to restaurants.

In the evenings he saw movies and plays, went to hear bands, or hung out with other musicians, drinking beer and smoking marijuana, in their homes or his own. There was a lot to see on the street: impromptu gigs, street theater, and performance art events that people called “happenings.” In the summer of 1967 the neighborhood suddenly became famous as the world center of the hippie movement. When schools and colleges closed for the vacation, youngsters from all over America hitchhiked to San Francisco and headed for the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The police decided to turn a blind eye to the widespread use of marijuana and LSD, and to people having sex more or less publicly in Buena Vista Park. And all the girls were taking the contraceptive pill.