Still Standing: The Savage Years (18 page)

I don’t recall much about the rest of the evening except for
when we got back to Luke’s flat. He turned on the stairs in front of me to ask if I was all right and there before my very eyes he’d turned into the spectre of the man who had haunted my childhood dreams – Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The front door key in Luke’s hand had transformed itself into a cut-throat razor and Luke himself into the image of the man I’d feared most.

I took off down the stairs like a whippet and ran down the road, screaming that Sweeney Todd was trying to kill me. Luke was in hot pursuit, trying to calm me down, which he managed to do eventually but not without a lot of fuss. Luke and I didn’t last long. He got a job with a fancy PR company, ditched the leather jacket for a more preppy look and ditched me for a more powerful squeeze who he hoped would further his career in the dizzy world of public relations.

The second time I took acid I did so unknowingly. I’d stayed overnight at a friend’s flat and was walking around the kitchen barefoot the next morning. Unbeknown to me he’d had a tab of acid in a saucer on a side table, put there for safe keeping, and somehow it transferred itself to the sole of my bare foot. It wasn’t until a few hours later on the bus going home through Brixton that it hit me. Again I can’t remember much apart from trying not to panic as my ears were assaulted by distorted waves of sound and the world around me melted into a blurred mess of colours and shapes. Somehow I got back to the flat where luckily Chrissie was at home and, recognizing my condition, forced gallons of orange juice down me to help bring me back to earth. After a few hours the violence of the trip subsided, leaving me in a dreamlike state during which I stared intently at a framed picture of Disney’s Wicked Queen
and watched her come alive and hold a conversation.

Never again, I vowed, and I never have.

One night in a pub called the Two Brewers in Clapham I bumped into Hush. I hadn’t seen him since he’d left me in the lurch in Slaithwaite but as I was glad to see him again I didn’t see the point of throwing up old grievances. Instead we simply picked up where we’d left off as if nothing had happened.

Hush was working at Allders in Clapham as a window dresser by day and doing the rounds by night in a double act with his old partner, John. As much as I’d vowed never to set foot on a stage again, he asked me to join him in a 50s/60s act that he’d got together for a May bank holiday at the Two Brewers as they were a drag queen short. I flatly refused at first but after constant badgering from Chrissie, Luke and Hush I eventually gave in, taking myself down to Fox’s in Covent Garden to purchase the necessary slap for the occasion. Hush knocked up a few costumes for me and supplied the wigs. Not feeling the least bit nervous about getting up in front of a packed pub again, I sailed on stage and thoroughly enjoyed myself, safe in the knowledge that this wasn’t a career move but just a bit of fun on a bank holiday for beer money. Well, that’s what I thought at the time. Hush and John split up and three weeks later I was back with Hush doing the rounds again in the Playgirls, juggling drag with social services, telling myself that maybe one day I’d make a decision and stick to it. I’m still waiting for this great day of enlightenment to arrive. I won’t hold my bloody breath.

The landlord of the Two Brewers was the incomparable Phil Starr. We all loved Phil. He was one of the old school who’d
been a drag entertainer since the early fifties. A superb comedian and teller of bawdy jokes, he was blessed with the sort of razor-sharp timing that simply can’t be taught. Doing his act one night at the Vauxhall Tavern he said of me with his usual deadpan delivery, ‘I saw Lily Savage at a bus stop the other night, blind drunk and eating a bag of chips with her drawers around her ankles. Well, I was ever so concerned so I went up to her and asked if she was all right, to which she answered, “Has he finished?”’

Hush would set his wig for him and occasionally if he was too busy on the sewing machine to deliver it himself I’d drop this freshly teased sheitel off at the pub. Phil liked his wigs blond, high and flat at the back.

‘Very nice, very nice,’ he’d say in his unmistakable London drawl, running his hand gently over the surface of the wig. ‘But I do wish you’d bring it in something a bit more glamorous than a fucking bin-liner, dear.’

In later years Phil moved to Brighton and formed a double act with another legendary stalwart of the gay scene, Maisie Trollette. They called themselves Arsenic and Old Lace. Phil never stopped working up to the day he died aged seventy-two in 2005, a quality act right up to the end and an impossibly hard one to follow.

Despite the irregular hours that played havoc with bookings for the act and the sometimes extremely difficult assignments, I was still enjoying working as a peripatetic.

At the time I was providing respite care for a notoriously cantankerous old woman called Miss Lacey, enabling her foster carer to have a much-needed break. They lived in a very comfortable flat in Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, a few doors down from the flat where Dennis Nilsen was carving
up the bodies of his victims and disposing of their grisly remains down the drains. Nilsen had once asked Vera if he wanted a lift home from the Black Cap. Thankfully Vera refused and went off to Bangs Disco instead, or God knows what fate might have awaited him.

Miss Lacey had her own cosy bedsitting room in the front of the house which she very rarely left except to complain about something. She was able to get around the flat quite smartly with the help of a stick if she chose to, but usually if she wanted me I was summoned by an electric bell. It went off in the kitchen each time she pushed the button in her room, which she did at least twenty times an hour in order to criticize everything I did for her, from the meals I prepared to the way I made her bed. After a week of dancing attendance on this old bitch’s every whim, running around after her as if I were a maid of all works, I finally cracked.

Awoken from a deep sleep at 5 a.m. one morning by the ringing of her bell, I jumped out of bed thinking something was wrong and in my confusion walked straight into the wardrobe, nearly breaking my nose in the process. I danced around the bedroom in pain, dripping blood on the beautiful cream carpet, the bell ringing incessantly as a soundtrack to my agony.

Grabbing some kitchen roll to try to stop the flow of blood from my nose, I marched into Miss Lacey’s room. Instead of being sprawled on the bedroom floor with a broken hip and hypothermia as I’d imagined, she was sat up in bed knitting and listening to the World Service on her little transistor radio.

‘You took your time,’ she sniped, ignoring my bloodied nose and the wad of kitchen roll pressed against it, ‘and in
future can you remember to knock before entering my room.’

At that moment if someone had rung the front door with a petition to make euthanasia compulsory I would have cheerfully signed it. Instead I put all such thoughts temporarily out of my mind and asked with as much civility as I could muster, given the hour, what she wanted.

‘I’d like a cup of tea if it’s not too much trouble,’ she said, maddeningly calm, ‘and before you go would you please pick up my ball of wool. It’s fallen off the bed.’

‘Is that all?’ I asked, furious. ‘You dragged me out of bed to pick up your bloody knitting and make tea? Have you any idea what time it is?’

‘It’s coming up to ten past five,’ she said, addressing me as if she were talking to an imbecile, ‘and I’m still waiting for a cup of tea.’

I read her the riot act, during which she remained unmoved and tight-lipped.

‘You are employed to care for me twenty-four hours a day, are you not?’ she asked.

‘Within reason,’ I faltered.

‘Are you or are you not employed to care for me twenty-four hours a day? Simply answer the question,’ she went on, in tones more suited to a crown prosecutor.

‘I suppose I am,’ I replied feebly.

‘Then in that case it’s not unreasonable to ask you, my carer, to pick up my ball of wool and make me a cup of tea, is it? So off you go and do what you are paid to do,’ she said, dismissing me imperiously with a wave of her hand.

I picked up the wool and then stomped into the kitchen in search of the tea caddy and some strychnine, annoyed with myself that I’d let her get the better of me yet again.

Earlier in the week I’d asked her if I might pop out and
leave her for a few hours on Friday night while I visited a sick friend, a pitiful excuse but I really needed to get out. In reality I had a booking at the Black Cap and if I cancelled Hush wouldn’t be very pleased and neither would Babs the landlady of the Cap, who quite rightly might not book us again if we cancelled at such short notice.

Miss Lacey had replied that she’d consider it and would give me her decision before Friday approached.

‘I’ve given your request to visit your friend this coming Friday evening some thought,’ she said as I gave her a cup of tea, ‘and in view of this morning’s behaviour I have come to the decision that the answer will not be in the affirmative.’

I wanted to pick up her knitting needles and shove them up her nose, but somehow I managed to resist this urge and try another approach.

‘Listen, Miss Lacey,’ I said, sitting on the end of her bed, ignoring her protests to get off it. ‘I don’t have a sick friend, I made that up.’

‘I knew it,’ she declared triumphantly, like the cat who’d got the cream. ‘I knew it was pure fabrication.’

‘Yes, well, I’m sorry for that,’ I said, picking at the candlewick. ‘But the truth is this. I don’t earn very much doing this job, so to supplement my income I do an act with a friend.’

‘What sort of an act?’ she interrupted.

It was far too early to start inventing a convoluted tissue of lies so I told her the truth, that I was part of a drag act.

She sat in bed staring at me. Then she slowly lowered her cup and saucer on to the bedside table and spoke.

‘I thought there was more to you than met the eye,’ she said, smiling for the first time since we’d met. ‘Do your employers know about this drag act?’

‘No, and I’d rather they didn’t.’

‘Understandably,’ she said, smiling again. ‘It would be disastrous for the council’s reputation to have an employee who looked after children and the elderly exposed as a drag act. The press would have a field day.’

I could hear her in my head, straight on the phone to the
News of the World
to tell them she was an elderly lady who’d been left on her own by her care officer because he was prancing around a pub in a dress. She’d probably add that she was making the call from the hall phone, having fallen down the stairs and broken both legs.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ she said after what felt like a lifetime. ‘You can stay out for as long as you like on Friday, and I’ll never breathe a word to anyone of your extracurricular activities, providing, that is …’

Here it comes, I thought.

‘Providing, that is,’ she said again, prolonging the agony by reaching out for her cup and taking a long thoughtful sip before she pronounced sentence. ‘Providing you take me with you. I’ve never seen a drag act before and it’s been so long since I was in a pub and it’s about time I had a night out.’

It was not what I was expecting and no matter how much I protested, Miss Lacey was adamant that she was accompanying me to the Cap on Friday night come hell or high water and that was that.

Her attitude towards me changed after my early morning confessional and she was far less demanding, hardly ever ringing her bell to summon me. Instead she made the effort to leave her room and come into the kitchen and talk. Over a coffee she revealed that in her day she’d been a highly respected cook, working in some of the grandest homes in England, preparing banquets and meals for royalty and for
what she reverently referred to as ‘the gentry’. She had photos and references to back up her claim, and insisted that I unearth from under her bed a large suitcase that contained the evidence of her life and career.

I studied a menu she’d prepared for a gala dinner at Henley in 1955, the year I was born. After reading the bill of fare, written out in her own hand in perfect French, I could understand why she’d turned her nose up at the burnt offerings I’d been serving up. This woman was a culinary artisan and here was I turning out lukewarm fish fingers and lumpy mashed spuds.

Come the day of the booking at the Cap, Miss Lacey spent a lot of time in her room, emerging around 6.45 looking smart in a well-cut coat and a blue felt hat. I wanted to get to the Cap extra early so I could find a space down the front for her to park her wheelchair, and I’d ordered a cab for 7 p.m.

‘Shall we have a gin and tonic while we’re waiting for the taxi?’ she asked graciously. ‘It seems appropriate. Or do you not like to drink alcohol before a performance?’

‘I never drink before I go on stage,’ I lied. ‘But as this is a special occasion I’ll join you in a very small one.’ This wasn’t hard to do as I wasn’t keen on gin, unlike Miss Lacey, who demolished a large one as we waited for the cab.

‘There he is,’ she said at the sound of the doorbell, getting out of her chair a lot faster than she had got in it. ‘Let me take your arm and you can walk me to the car, the driver can fold up my wheelchair and put it in the boot.’ All those years of working for the upper classes had obviously rubbed off on Miss Lacey and she glided down the path and into the back of the car as to the manor born.

I parked her near to the stage, next to a couple of women who promised they’d keep an eye on her.

‘And if you wanna go to the toilet, love,’ one of them said kindly, ‘just give me the nod and I’ll take you.’

Miss Lacey inclined her head graciously by way of thanks, and relieved that she was in good hands I escaped to the dressing room to get ready. Hush was already there sipping a pint of the freshly mixed ‘baby’.

‘I see you’ve brought your mother’ was his only comment.

It was gone one o’clock in the morning when we got home and Miss Lacey was slightly pissed. Apart from the obvious signs, she asked me, as she prepared for bed, for a glass of water and her Steradent tablets, a request that would’ve grated on a sober Miss Lacey’s gentility.