The Good Boy (21 page)

But was he mistaken? If I had stayed on and had accepted his further payment, then there would be no denying that that would have constituted prostitution. Was I ready for that career, perhaps on a part-time if not a full-time basis? I was not yet 30, in good shape and apparently not unattractive, I was keen to get a good share of sex in my life and was not really averse to being appreciated in cash or in kind. Many successful and respectable marriages were built on such a foundation, I had come to realise. But while I found it difficult to identify moral objections to working as a prostitute, I saw several physical ones. For a start, it was illegal in many countries and so arrest and imprisonment were possible consequences. Secondly, it could see one run the risk of physical harm, whether from brutish clients or from street gangs or vigilante groups. And a gay prostitute seemed to be in a more vulnerable position than a straight one. Thirdly, it seemed to increase the health hazards faced in life and fourthly it was likely to be a socially damaging and isolating choice of career: many a prostitute had come to grief once deprived of the support of socially well-placed clients … Mme du Barry's rendezvous with the guillotine came to mind!

It had been a strange evening: I had made some money, had been called a prostitute, had had a long walk and some useful exercise … and had made some little progress in working out what to do, or what not to do, with my life!

After a few more days in London and no teaching job offers, I took a Saturday morning train north to Birmingham where, I was told, there was an acute shortage of casual/relief teachers. I found myself digs in a B&B in Handsworth run by a cheerful Irishwoman, and unpacked. After living out of a suitcase for six weeks or so it was nice to begin to feel ‘at home'. I did some washing and, in preparation for job interviews on the Monday, hung a good white shirt on the line on the Sunday morning, which was bitterly cold but quite sunny. Again in penitent mode, I walked the twenty minutes or so to the nearest Catholic church for Mass.

When I got back after a couple of hours, I found the shirt still on the line, not dry but as stiff as a board. It had frozen on the clothesline! My head and shoulders were lightly powdered with snow, the legs of my trousers were damp, and my shoes were soaked through from squelching along the slushy streets. Fortunately I had dry clothes in my room and after a hot bath (a shilling extra), a toasted sandwich and a mug of tea (two shillings and sixpence extra) I was feeling better. My white shirt was dried in the ‘airing cupboard' under the stairs where the hot water system was located and I eventually got it ironed and everything sorted out for a fresh start on the Monday morning.

Next day I reported to the local education authorities and, sure enough, was offered an interview on the following day for a position teaching French and English on the staff of a suburban Secondary Modern School. That evening I headed for the Turkish Baths in Handsworth. I was still feeling half-frozen by the Birmingham winter and I had heard somewhere, probably in the London photographer's studio, that in England Turkish Baths on ‘Men's Night' were often very gay-friendly. The Baths were housed in an interesting old purpose-built Victorian building of vaguely Moorish design and of polychrome brick construction. Inside was warm and steamy, a dimly-lit labyrinth of rubbermatted floors, tiled walls and terrazzo-domed ceilings, inhabited by white-towelled male figures appearing out of and disappearing into the steamy gloom. I had never been to a Turkish Bath before but quickly found that there were plenty of habitués happy to show me the ropes. Swimming naked in the heated pool was a joy and the vigorous massage with warm oil and soapsuds was surprisingly relaxing. I was then stood in a corner and hosed down with a powerful jet of cold water, then wrapped in a large warm towel and invited to curl up and snooze a little in the warm, dark ‘Recovery Room'.

That was, I discovered, where the gay-friendly side of things was and I soon found myself chatting to and then cuddling with an Englishman of my own age who worked as a clerk in central Birmingham. While we were both being careful and went no further than synchronised masturbation, I found myself telling him all about my mixed-up life and about my exploits with the photographers in Paris and London. I don't know why I confided in this way in a total stranger, one whom I never did see again, but I still remember feeling that he was a nice chap and a sensible fellow. His comment at the end of my story has stuck with me ever since. ‘Sounds like an impulse towards self-destruction,' he said of the adventures with the photographers.

Tucked up in bed that night and reviewing the day, I felt that he had been correct: there had been at least one suicide in the family and my experimenting with the gay life and with the porn industry (which is what the first two of the three photographers were really about, if in a rather mild way) could indeed lead to disaster. I had better stop there and then and remember the good doctor's advice that the choice was mine to make. Was I choosing gay or straight? Was I going to lead a homo or a hetero life? Was I choosing the teaching profession … or the oldest profession in the world, i.e. the sex industry? I resolved to stick with teaching and was determined to join the Catholic bourgeoisie in Melbourne … and therefore to choose ‘straight'.

The next morning I took a bus out to the school for my interview. I had never been to the Midlands or to Birmingham before and I was appalled by the drab ugliness I saw from the upstairs windows of the bus on the way out to the school, by the dreary monotony of the city and its soot-caked suburbs. I found that ‘my' school was a large, new, co-ed Secondary Modern School on a new ring road on the outskirts of the city proper, just beyond the ugliness and almost in the green belt that had been left around the city in the then still incomplete reconstruction twenty years after the end of World War II. The whole suburb was a new development that had not yet degenerated into a concrete and plastic slum. I seem to recall a few trees planted here and there.

I was interviewed by the Headmaster, a down-to-earth Yorkshireman, the Senior Mistress, a diminutive and sharp-eyed Scot, and the French Mistress, a smiling young Irishwoman … and was offered the job, starting the next day and teaching French and English to some rather unwilling students in Forms I, II and III. One complained to me that he would never meet any Frenchmen in Birmingham and saw no use in learning the language, as he wanted to join his brother and work in the local butchery. Another complained to a school pal, but within hearing of a teacher who laughingly passed it on to me, that he did not want to be taught English by a ‘kangaroo'.

E. R. Braithwaite's
To Sir With Love
had been published only a few months earlier and I had read it on the ship on the way to Europe. The similarity of my school to the one in the novel was striking. Class control, like playground duty, was quite a challenge for all the teachers including the quiet young teacher from Australia, where schools and schooling were still held in much higher general esteem than they were by the students in the UK's Secondary Modern system. But I coped. I remembered a professor of education in Melbourne once saying to a group of teacher-trainees that had included me that discipline in class was a mysterious thing: in many ways it could not be taught to trainee teachers … you either had it or did not have it. He recalled seeing a strapping young teacher who was a star on the football field but absolutely unable to control a class of noisy fourteen-year-olds, while another young teacher, ‘a mere slip of a girl' as the professor put it, was able to walk into the same class and instantly have absolute control. I was neither a football star nor a slip of a girl but I suppose that an Australian was a bit exotic in Birmingham and a French teacher who had just arrived from France had a certain
cachet
. So discipline was less of a problem for me than was the feeling that there was indeed little point in teaching French to kids who had already been sifted and sorted by the English ‘Eleven Plus' examination (since abandoned) and labelled ‘not academic'.

The Headmaster, a very decent fellow, waited for a few weeks to see how I performed and then, presumably satisfied with my work, asked me if I would like to teach for two half-days a week in a nearby Grammar School ‘where the situation would be very different and where you would have a very different kind of experience'. I jumped at the opportunity and so, thanks to his kindness and to the cooperation of his friend, the Headmaster of the Grammar School, I soon had a quite different impression of the education system in the UK. At the Grammar School (a boysonly establishment) the French class was slightly larger but was made up solely of boys who had chosen to do French and who had been selected by the Eleven Plus examination as being academically and intellectually suited to go on through secondary and even tertiary study. They were eager to learn, never missed doing their homework and lessons, and competed with one another in their efforts to show how well they had been studying. My questions would be met with a forest of raised hands and cries of ‘Sir, sir, ask me, sir' and so on. The difference between the two schools was a stunning demonstration of the way in which society in England was then still class-riven. The children of the lower socio-economic classes seemed condemned to lives like those of their parents; to get out and up one needed either results at the Eleven Plus exam good enough to earn a scarce scholarship to a grammar school or else one needed parents rich enough to pay the grammar school's fees. Bettering oneself and helping children to better themselves seemed to me to be much easier in Australia.

The Secondary Modern School was, of course, co-ed and the staff comprised a pretty even mix of men and women. With the issue of ‘What lifestyle are you going to choose?' reverberating in my head, I even found time, and courage, to court the Senior French Mistress, the pretty young girl from Galway who had been on the interviewing panel when I secured the job. This courtship soon saw us going out together almost every night for six months, at her behest nearly always to a pub and nearly always with a group of teacher colleagues. This was a totally new scene to me and I hated the pubs and the endless, mindless drinking, but I was dazzled by my Irish colleen. She was the queen of that little group and indeed of the staffroom, and I could hardly believe that she favoured me, the ‘new chum', above all others.

We progressed from holding hands to a very decorous goodnight kiss, and I was eventually invited home to be checked out by her parents. I seemed to pass muster and all went well until the conversation drifted around to my Irish forebears. I rattled off the family names of my seven Irish great-grandparents, ending with ‘Wade', the maiden name of my great-grandmother born in Tipperary. At that the colleen's mother raised her eyes heavenwards and said: ‘Lord save us, the tinkers!' Somebody diplomatically changed the subject and I later learned that Wade
⁴⁵
was the name used by one of Ireland's more numerous and troublesome tribes of tinkers (or gypsies or travelling people or Romany as they are known in other countries). The family must have wondered for a while whether my Wade genes were a desirable match for those of their only daughter.

Shortly thereafter the school year ended. I hired a car, a royal blue Mini Minor, and we set off together for a couple of weeks touring in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, the birthplace of my Hockey forebears.
⁴⁶
I then had to leave Birmingham for France in pursuit of a teaching post for the new school year and decided not to leave before proposing marriage. Being given the somewhat enigmatic answer of ‘Wait and see', I bought an engagement ring, an Australian opal set in diamonds, which was accepted with another slightly disconcerting remark: ‘Well, we're not really engaged but if we do get engaged this will be the engagement ring.' My colleen then accompanied me to Paris for a further two weeks' holidaying together (separate hotel rooms, of course) and as two Francophiles we had a great time sightseeing and enjoying boulevard life. Then it was time for her to return to Birmingham for the coming school year and for me to travel south to Lyon for a job interview. I did secure a teaching position in that city, in a large Catholic boys' secondary school, to be taken up two weeks after the interview.

Having both a little money and some time to spare I decided to head for the Côte d'Azur and some sunshine before being obliged to face a second European winter. Not at all sure whether I was really ‘engaged' and, as a result, set firmly on a heterosexual path, ever ambivalent, I booked in for a few days in a small ‘gay-friendly' hotel near Nice, overlooking the sea and offering modestly priced
pension complète.
On my first evening there I was asked to share a table for the evening meal with two 40-something German guys and soon found the conversation being steered from Australia and its beaches to Nice and its surrounds, to swimming, sunbaking, and sex at sea. I was in fact being sounded out, and by the end of the meal had been invited to spend the following day with them on their yacht ‘where no clothes are needed and where we could swim and sunbake and really relax.' I was very tempted, but in the morning I politely declined: I did want the sexual adventure but was nervous about being totally dependent on them out at sea (they were both big, powerful guys and I was not a strong swimmer) … and like many of the Frenchmen around me, I had not quite forgiven
les Boches
for starting the two world wars.

I was more trusting the next night when, after dinner, I went walking alone in the Jardin Albert I between the Place Massena and the Promenade des Anglais. There, I had heard, a young gay man would not long be left alone … and so it proved to be. I had no sooner sat down on a bench under the palm-trees than I was joined by a strikingly handsome Frenchman, dressed immaculately in a white linen suit, his greying dark hair perfectly groomed, a cigarette holder gracefully waving towards the seat with a ‘
Vous permettez?
'
⁴⁷
I was flattered that such a suave and elegant chap would be interested in me and was instantly hooked and prepared to follow him out to sea, up into the mountains, wherever he wanted. In fact, however, he just wanted to chat. He had been out for his postprandial stroll, had noticed me ‘alone and a little lost' and had thought to talk. He was, he said, gay and had immediately picked me as being gay (lesson number one). He was, however, married and had two young children and was not in a position to play, much as he would like to (lesson number two).