In one respect the timing was perfect. In previous years I would have had to tell Mum about the phone sooner or later, and then she’d have been calling me the whole time, sparing Dr Beamish and putting pressure on me direct.
I had some enjoyable little chats with the operator. In those days the telephone wire went straight into the wall, and if you put the phone off the hook you could be reported. They would put the howler on to get your attention. I used to enjoy teasing the operator, saying I had sabotaged the bell with a wire so I didn’t hear the bell if I didn’t want to. Technically this would have been tampering, and a punishable offence. I was living dangerously.
As a third-year I had lost some of my social fear. I was beginning to be anxious about the future rather than the present, wondering what life after Cambridge would be like. I couldn’t imagine it. Clearly, though, it was a good thing that returning to the bosom of the family was no longer an option. The family bosom was off limits and out of bounds. Family and I were giving each other the cold, the frozen shoulder.
One worthwhile ‘side-effect’ was that there was no need to worry about my reputation any more. I had nothing to lose. My parents already thought I derived sexual pleasure from pictures of youngsters lolling in socks.
Still, when someone at a CHAPs meeting first disparagingly mentioned the ‘meat market’ I thought, as a long-serving vegetarian, that these gloating carnivores were referring to an actual market where carcases were displayed, all the marvellous machinery of life impaled on a hook and cut up to be sold. In fact the reference was to the Stable Bar, off Trinity Street, a narrow premises where homosexuals not enlightened enough to attend meetings might be found. It had the look of a hotel bar, with plenty of red plush and folksy bits of beaming which looked fake even if they weren’t, and plenty of horse brasses to back up the name, though there would only have been the space to accommodate a single horse.
I never heard anyone refer to the Stable Bar in anything but damning terms, yet everyone turned up there at some stage, even Ken, though he looked rather lost. I saw the Tonys there once or twice, although they hardly noticed strangers and were the only people present whose motives were blamelessly social.
Ken only visited the meat market to spread the word about the group, to tell those writhing in the coils of the patriarchy the good news that there existed an independent forum, not far away, where issues of sexual and political liberation could be freely discussed and worked through. He would nerve himself with a couple of pints then spread the word from table to table. His reception from groups was sometimes mildly abusive, so he tended to gravitate towards single strangers, less prompt to defend themselves. There was something about him, as he advanced heavily towards people who often edged away or tried to avoid his eyes, reminiscent of Gladstone scouring Piccadilly for loose women to coax back to Downing Street for soup and Bible-reading. He had the same admirable and slightly suspect motives, even if his success rate in these mercy swoops couldn’t compete.
On Saturday nights George took to pushing me up to the street entrance to the Stable, then over its awkward threshold. He would pause outside the door of the bar to take a deep breath. Entering the premises with a wheelchair required careful choreography: a vigorous push to the door followed immediately by a judicious pressing down on the handles so as to clear the change of level before the door came back and bashed me, while also swinging the chair round to negotiate the cramped space inside the doorway.
Practical criticism
There was another reason for George’s intake of breath, every bit as understandable. The mass turning of heads was unnerving, though conversation didn’t stop. Nor did the jukebox stop playing, but its music seemed to be replaced for those crucial moments of appraisal by a drum-roll, the ominous linked paradiddles that precede a star turn or a public execution.
George pushed me ahead of him in the wheelchair like a hostage-taker advancing into police spotlights behind a human shield. I could hardly blame him for that, but my invisibility despite its impressive candle-power was only enough for one.
He shrivelled under the fusillade of judging eyes. This was scrutiny, if you like. This was practical criticism. No Leavisite concentrating the intellectual X-rays onto a page of Our Mutual Friend or Sons and Lovers could send out a beam of comparable intensity.
Of course George wasn’t particularly informed about the Cambridge tradition of English Studies. Nothing in his life of genteel retail had prepared him for this raking blast of icy assessment. Then its wave-length shifted as we were classified as unattractive and (worse) familiar. I can’t say I was too bothered, but then for me it was much of a muchness, more or less business as usual. It cost me nothing to absorb some of the impact, and I was happy to screen him from the worst of the mutagenic exposure, the crossfire from whole emplacements of appraising eyes.
When I wasn’t actually in the firing line, there was some fun to be had from noticing the nuances of the examination. Some people only looked at the bottoms of people with nice faces. Others only looked at the faces of people with nice bottoms.
I don’t remember making any new acquaintances at the Stable Bar, except when one man came over to me and said he worked in the University Library. He was good enough to tell me that I had a nickname at the UL. Toad of Toad Hall (Poop! poop!). Not the worst nickname in the world and yes, I dare say I could seem a little imperious when I sounded the car horn, to signal that the books I had ordered should be toted down to me.
While the leaves were still on the trees I began to be preöccupied with the ritual midwinter festival. Over the years I had borne various grudges against Christmas. First because it came round so slowly. Then that it crowded out my birthday by being so close to it. Next that it was too commercial. Then that it was too Christian. Now I felt that it came round too quickly. The Christ Child seemed to be bearing down on me at the wheel of his holly-trimmed steamroller, and this was the first year that he would find me out in the open, with nowhere to hide.
If I had been able to send a message about what I wanted for Christmas using Granny’s special system of chimney semaphore, a slip of paper burnt in the fireplace to give Santa his cue, mine would have been along the lines of Yule! Yule! Steer well clear! Come again another year!
Peter had found a job at a hotel near Bristol, an old coaching inn. He had accommodation there and gamely offered to play host, but I couldn’t quite see that as a practical proposition. So what were my options, realistically? Well, now that I no longer had a home, there was always a Home. A referral from my GP would be child’s play. No exaggeration would be necessary. It was a perfectly routine request. Still, I was in no hurry to meet the Ghost of Christmas Future, the many Ghosts of Christmases to come. What sort of person ends up in a Home at the time of year when even the most abject orphans are taken in? I wasn’t in any hurry to find out.
I decided that I would put myself about, socially, and accept the first offer I got, no questions asked. Call it Russian roulette, only played with Christmas crackers rather than the customary revolver. The trouble being that if ever I pull a cracker and win, it’s because someone is being kind and would like me to have a tie-pin.
Socially the hot spot of the moment was something called King’s Bop, that is, a disco in the cellar of a modern building in King’s College. Downing could offer no comparable attraction. King’s was ever a trendy hotbed. Girls had been sighted there, rare girls, girls never seen elsewhere. A different species from those who manifested themselves in common room and lecture hall, shop and street.